USB Ext drive recovery catch-22

[Xparatrooper]

Okay, first my history:

I had my external drive attached to my laptop and I wiped the drive on my laptop.

When re-installing WinXP, I forgot to disconnect the USB External drive.

I accidentally started the FDISK process and deleted my USB partition.

I caught my error before I formatted.

I completed the laptop WinXP install, and when I plugged the USB drive in, Windows says "drive is not formatted, would you like to format it now?" to which I say "no" and I disconnected the USB drive.

I searched for some program to help me "recover an accidental FDISK" and found Acronis.

After paying for it and installing it, both the manual and automatic disk recovery refuse to help saying "cannot find any unallocated space"

I cannot create space to save recovery information without formatting, and formatting may further damage the information on the drive.

What do I do?

I cannot remember if the original USB format was FAT32 or NTFS... but what troubles me is that Acronis can't seem to find anything at all.

I am running Acronis on WinXP Pro SP2.

I can ship someone some nice Alaska salmon if I can bribe my way into some assistance : )

Thanks very much,
Royce

[Acronis Support]

Hello Royce,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Partition and Disk Managing Software (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/).

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

Please create Acronis Report having your external USB drive connected as it is described in Acronis Help Post (http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=55317).

Please also make a screen shot of Disk Management utility (Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management).

Please submit a request for technical support (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/my/support/). Attach all the collected files to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
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Kirill Omelchenko