I have been using this USB hard drive for over a year, but now XP has problems with it. It sees ithe drive, but can’t open it. When I try, the system is busy for a couple of minutes and ends up saying the drive needs to be formatted. This is the same behavior on all three of my PC’s at home, so it must be the drive, right? What can I do to get the data off of that drive?

The filesystem has probably become corrupted Use file recovery software.

http://www.windowsdiskrecovery.com/