win 7 = raw external drive

There has been much success using the EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard There is a demo that you can test with, and if it finds your data, buy it and recover all your stuff.

Test Disk is free and often very effective.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

If they are your backups, try partitioning and reformatting the drive. Try it for a while before trusting it and then will all of their contents with them.take all of their contents with them.make new copies from your originals. You should make fresh backups somewhere else in case your original files are lost before you get the drive running again.

As mentioned, Testdisk is as good as any partition recovery softwre you can get anywhere, pay or free. It can also recover files now.

Any file that is not backed up is a file you should expect to lose. All hard drives will fail if used, and often they take all of their contents with them.

If you have a real XP CD, not just a OEM recovery disk, then you can create a ultimate boot CD for windows, which is a boot CD made from your XP files, some what like a live Linux CD. See this; http://ubcd4win.com/index.htm , then when you boot to this you can access most likely that external hard drive to copy files and folders.

Easeus Data Recovery Free will recover 1 GB of data for you. That will at least tell you if the full version would work after you verify that the recovered files are usable.

Have you tried this drive with another computer?