I had a dual boot system with WinXP on my internal drive and Fedora 7 on a USB drive. I tried Ubuntu and decided to install it on the USB hd, which is partitioned, half for linux and half for XP backups. The system crashed during the installation. I was then left with a Windows system that wouldn't boot because the MBR was looking for grub. To make a long story a little shorter, I got "help" from HP which resulted in me shooting myself in the foot and destroying XP. After long suffering I have a system that works minus a lot of data. Now I would like to restore the USB drive, but it won't respond at all. I don't know how to address the hd and, hopefully, retrieve the backups on it and restore it to pristine condition so I can resume using linux on it. Can some knowledgeable soul please tell me how to do this?
Many thanks in advance.
dickgb@comcast.net

If you are referring to not being able to view the usb drive from within xp. I suggest you use Ubuntu in Live CD mode to access the drive. As long as the drive is detected, if it doesn't automount then you should be able to manually mount it. You should also be able to mount your xp drive. You can then copy data from the usb drive to your xp drive.

Fantastic! Works like a charm. Both drives were detected and automounted. It sees WinXP and backups but everything is zipped. I used Handy Backup, which should not have affected the Windows file system but it too seems to be zipped. Strangely, it does not see the linux partition where I have Fedora installed. It does see the Windows network but I can't access it because it wants a security key which I don't know since it isn't ever requested when I use it from my XP machine. Do you know any way I can recursively unzip the files I want? I could do it selectively picking only the important directories, or whatever you might suggest. Handy Backup is not working to restore files and working with the developer is very difficult because he/they is in Russia and, because of the time difference we can only get one exchange per day.
Thanks very much for your insight.

It might be the backup partition is owned by an administrator. When trying to access it via a Windows machine you'll be denied, in which case you'll have to take ownership of the partition logged in as administrator from a Windows XP Pro machine.
Normally Linux does not have this issue and can access the partition and you can retrieve files, providing the drive can be mounted.
If it cannot be mounted:
You can make a dd image of the drive and mount the partition in a loop specifying an offset as to the start position of the partition on the drive. An example follows, the second command should show all partition positions.

Although I haven't tried it, you should also be able to make a dd image of the partition you want to access instead of the whole drive and mount it this way without an offset value.

One more question, now that I'm on a roll. When I get finished retrieving my data by accessing the usb drive with live ubuntu, how to I remove/replace the grub file so that I can use the the external drive. My ultimate goal is to install linux (probably Ubuntu) on the internal drive and have XP on the usb drive. What I want, in that case is to have dual booting with the internal drive as the primary boot drive. OK, that's more that one question.

Request help to do this in a fresh post.