I have a situation. I have an external hard drive that is used strictly for media storage. It is a 250GB Lacie Porshe USB drive. Recently it is no longer accessible in windows. It is detected, but viewed as an unformatted disk. I have tried running the SystemRecoveryCD and have found that there are errors in the BootSector. I am a noob at this and don't want to go writing new MBR or anything because I'm afraid of making the disk further inaccessible. When booting to the SystemRecoveryCD using the TestDisk and Gparted application, I can see my drive listed at /dev/sda however it shows up as an unknown filesystem. It is a FAT32 system. I ran FDisk from terminal and this is what it shows:
Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 Bytes
255 Heads, 63 sectors/trac, 30401 cylinders
Units= cylinders of 16065*512 = 8225280 butes
Device Boot Start End Blocks ID System
/dev/sda1 * 1 30401 244196001 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

I've also tried mounting the disk on Knoppix when booting via livecd and was unable to mount the disk.
When running Testdisk on analyze, it has a read error at 0/1/7 (lba=69)

I have Window's XP and Debian and if I can't recover the drive would like to just be able to copy the directories to another external drive but don't know how to go about it.

I know I'm probably not covering all the necessary information, but if theres anything further that would help let me know.
Thanks

if you have another drive, bigger than 250 megs, use dd to copy the damaged drive to the good one. then you can use filesystem repair stuff on the new drive to get what you can off of it.

Should I copy to a new directory in the new drive? Otherwise wouldn't I create the same problem on the new disk? Or is that why I need a disk bigger than the original disk?

you will be making a duplicate of the old drive, bad data and good data, that you might be able to repair if the drive can be written to without errors. trying to fix the data structures on the bad drive may make things worse.
obviously this will take a crap load of hard drive space and time, and luck, but otherwise the stuff is all gone now anyway.
With all the stuff dd'd to a new drive, you can at least try different ways of fixing things on the new drive without further destroying more data on the original bad drive.

no directory for copying, and yes, that's why the destination drive needs to be bigger. neither the source or destination drive should have any partitions mounted, and the command would be something like # dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hdc.
I'm just guessing at the device names.
find and use schily's sdd instead of dd if you want a progress report while copying. he wrote cdrtools also.

After running dd_rescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb I booted into windows, as the disk was a FAT32 and fdsk appears to work on ext3 filesystems and the drive isn't recognized as It now has the same errors on it. I run chkdsk /r/f and it repairs the errors and the drive works but there is nothing on it. What happened to the data I copied from the failed drive? Does chkdsk erase that when I run it? Sorry, I'm an amateur.