External hard drive backup problem?

[parum]

First I hope I am posting this in the right place. Ok, my mom bought herself an external hard drive for the purpose of storing GB's of photos. Now I wasn't there when they hooked it up to her PC but my nephew tells me that he clicked on some options and it started doing it's thing for quite a while. Within a few days the PC started acting up an eventually failed to load Windows XP Home Edition. When I checked the external it had the same amount of used space as her hard drive did which leads me to believe that they inadvertently backed up the system to the external.

So a few days go by an my mom gets some so called "PC Tech" to look at it and he says that there's nothing on the external and that she had start from scratch with a new drive and OS. I think he's wrong since as I stated the external has used space equal to the old hard drive. Now why do I question this techs skills? I was told he opened up the PC and proceeded to clean out the dust with a vacuum cleaner! Can you say "Holy ESD Batman?" So anyway what I would like to know is is it possible to either access the info on the external or can I buy her a new hard drive and transfer the data from the external to the new drive and expect it to work like normal?

I have some experience working on PC's but this one is a bit advanced so I need some help. I appreciate all replies and all your help.

[liljim]

sooooo many variables here. The best place to start is to connect the external to a different pc and see exactly whats on it. If you can find out if shes getting errors or just whats going on with the original HDD, we may can address that also.

[speelyi]

Download Puppy Linux 5.2.8 ISO ( http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%20L ... lucidpuppy )and burn to CD at no more than 8X to insure integrity; tweak the BIOS to boot to cdrom drive and boot to Puppy as a LiveCD; plug in external hard drive and mount it. See what's on there. Delete any backup Windows OS using Puppy.

Formatting the external hdd to FAT32 may be the hard part, since Win7 doesn't allow it, but this is what i recommend you do.