HDD Partitioning / File System Issues

Hi
I have a desktop PC running xp home edition. I recently started encountering some virus like issues which i couldnt reslove so today i decided to wipe my system drive and reinstall a fresh winxp.
Ever since reinstalling, windows isnt able to access my external usb HDD.
It shows up in my computer and in disk management but when i try to access it i get the following message " H:/ is not accesible, The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable"
The external HDD appears in Partition magic as H: ?m? and shows a pink/purple icon with NTFS in the "Type" column. The staus is active and pri/log column lists the drive as primary. There is no extended or unallocated section and i am unable to create a new partition on the drive.
I also installed Active Partition Recovery and did a quick scan. it recognises the drive with its original drive lable (WD) from before i reinstalled windows and it also displays a directory tree with my data folders so im assuming that my data is still on the drive. I didnt have the external drive attached to the pc when i reinstalled windows so i see no way that it could have been wiped.
I dont understand about partitioning or file system master tables and such so i just dont know what to do. I used this external drive to backup up all of my data before the reinstall of xp so now im screwed if i cant access this data again. I would massively appreciate any advice on this issue.

 

First time user. need help pls...I keep getting error message: Invalid backweb application ID 7288971.. have no idea what it means. can anyone help me. thanks:confused

 

suhr281 Hi you need to start your own separate post, your question will be lost within this post.

Phil

 

chaykinlester The drive in question may also have been infected, rarely do you get away with only one drive being infected usually all connected data drives get nailed. Give this post a day or so to see if one of the techs chime in, they may be able to come up with an idea. If no one chimes in soon put another post in Malware Removal, I have a hunch that is where this need to be!

Phil