I have an external USB disk which has gone "bad" (I don't know exactly what happened, I have a suspision though!).

I know that the drive itself can be saved with a zero-fill, but I was wondering how or if I can recover the data? I recall there being a way when this happened before with a different drive, but I do not know what utility I used.

Please help, this is the drive I kept my backups on.

Also, I am sorry if this is not the correct place for this-- I was unsure if I should put it in software or not.

There's a free recovery software called recuva that may be what you're looking for.

No, it's not that I've deleted anything.

Also please note that windows refuses to logically mount the drive.

If you've used a program like DBaN then I can more or less guarantee all your stuff is truly gone forever.

I haven't used any utilities that are designed to wipe a drive.

This happened as an accidental "glitch" and at least some of the data should be recoverable.

What is the current situation regarding your drive structures?

Utilities say that the boot record is broken. I suspect that the structure (file table) is only partically damaged. The drive is FAT, however I managed to breifly coax windows into mounting it, so it must be at least somewhat together.