I have a Inspiron Mini (Windows 7 - 2 yerars old) and I also have a Buffalo External Hard Drive.  I have been using it for a year to store all my travel photos -- today I turn on my laptop and it says I have to re-format the D drive to open it.  I believe I will lose my photos if I do that, correct?  I went into the disk manager and changed the drive letter to "E" because I thought I would be able to open it then.  It still says that drive is not accessible -- data error - cyclic error? .  How can I get my laptop to recognize the hard drive again? Thanks, Marilyn958