Did i loose all my data in my external hard drive?

i just purchased a new i mac and i installed my western digital hard drive to it and i installed leopard. i clicked on the time machine icon and it asked me which drive to use for time machine and i selected the wd drive. then it told me that it would format the drive and i said no way!!!! so i hit cancel. well now i have no access to that drive for some reason. it reads it as a time machine drive and i cannot get any of the info off of it. i plug it in to my windows based pc and it doesn't even recognize the drive? what is the deal? i a 100% positive that i did not accept the time machine format option. i read everything carefully and saw that it was going to format the drive with all of my family photos of 7 years and i clicked no way! why can't i get the drive recognized on my other pcs either?
thanks
C

That's a tough one I would turn off Time Machine right away so that it does not start writing to that drive. So you say the drive mounts on your desktop? Right click on the drive icon and Get Info on the drive. It will say Kind, Date Created, Modified, but look at Format and see what it says. If it says Mac OS Extended it would seem that it was indeed formatted. Otherwise it would say PC DOS or Fat32 and Time Machine would not be able to use the drive until you reformat it.

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