Advice needed: My external hard disk is not found in Windows

Hi, I need someone to show me how I can access my external USB hard disk WITHOUT windows autorunning (or anything similar) the disk.

I am running Windows XP Pro.

Why do I want to do this? Well, I thinkg the external hard disk is infected with a virus. When I connect it, the drive spins up and just spins and spins and never appears in the list of drives in Windows Explorer. Perhaps some kind of loop has been set up, in for example the [url removed, login to view] file.

This happened at the same time the computer was infected with the Happili virus, so it seems to be connected.

It seems that the problem is that the drive is autoruning and probably autorunning malicious / buggy code. I just want to get in there and retrieve a few files. No autorun, no scan of disk, simple. It would be easy in DOS but Windows seems to be causing lots of problems with its "automated" handling.

Several things I've already tried, but failed:

1) disabling autorun, as per:

<[url removed, login to view]>

2) editing the registry using a .reg file with this in it:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\[url removed, login to view]]

@="@SYS:DoesNotExist"

Windows still seems to be "autorunning" or scanning or doing something. Frankly it shouldn't be doing ANYTHING when I insert the usb stick. It should be waiting for me to tell it to do something. But hey, that's Windows.

Finally I tried creating a Ubuntu (linux) flash boot disk. Finally got this to work and boot to Ubuntu from the flash disk, but now I discover that Ubuntu has some autorun issues too. In addition, it is "unable to mount the disk"

Any help is much appreciated!

Thanks

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