Basically, all my media files from the last four or five years are on this disk. This is how it went down: My laptop was having problems so I decided to reinstall windows and and rewrite the main disk (c I went through all the motions and got a clean install... except when i went to my c: drive there were still files there from my last install. Aggravated, I tried again. (I had selected the option for a clean install) This time I deleted the "c" partition and then created a new one using the free space on that internal hdd. I then installed windows XP on it. Everything is fine now except that when I connect my external hdd (formerly the G: drive and has all my software and movies, music etc) , it doesnt list the drive under my computer. There is a "safely remove hardware" icon on my taskbar though, and under disk management it shows "Disc 1 Basic 465.76 GB Online" But it shows next to it that 465.76 GB is "Unallocated" Should I create a new volume and assign it a drive letter? What about all my info? I need to recover this data. What should i do?!
What version of Windows? I seemingly had the same issue you have with your HDD and I have assigned a drive letter in Windows Vista to an HDD and it worked and it coul dbe seen in Windows Explorer. When I tried it with Windows XP, the option to assign a drive letter was grayed out.
not sure if your laptop was a sony,hp type where you run their windows recovery cds to re-do your os. but besides the point what you can try to do is get some data recovery software (there are some out there could probably get for free) and run it and grab the "lost" data off of it. its pretty simple to use, but it can be time consuming if your 500gb external drive was pretty full. also you will need another drive to store the data on. so if there was 200gb of data on the external drive you will probably need like another 250+gb external drive to hook up to transfer the data to, most will not recover lost data onto the same drive. I think there was one called Easy Professional that I have used in the past with good success.
I have Windows XP. I have a dell laptop and I used a burned image of windows XP for dell computers. Do i really need to do data recovery at this point or perhaps its as simple as figuring out how to assign a new drive letter to the drive (even though I dont know why I would have to do this)
"Acquire" Partition Magic 8 (or buy it...yeah) and recover partition. I had the same problem, that worked perfectly.
sorry to hear that, i just had an external hard drive crap out on me tonight too. the problem sounds similar to yours except for i'm thinking it's a hardware thing. i have a lot of stuff that i transferred to it too, some replaceable, some not. i'm "aquiring" partition magic 8 like miguel said and giving that a shot.
DrewP As I understand it, you do not have an HDD problem, you have a problem with Windows recognizing the HDD and assigning it a drive letter. For example, I just plugged the HDD that my Windows XP will not assign a drive letter to. It shows up in device manager. Go to control panel->computer management and click on storage. Click on disk management. I assume you see it there and it is probably named Disk # (some number greater than 0). It probably also shows you what type of partitiion it has. Is that correct? If you right click on it, it should open a window. Is the option available to "change drive letter and path"? If so, select it and asign it a drive letter and you should be good to go via windows explorer. On my version of Windows XP, I am unable to assign it a drive letter, but if I plug it into Windows Vista and do the same steps, I can and my data is all there. That being said, if I have it connected to Windows XP and it still doesn't have a drive letter, I can use a backup program (e.g. Bounce Back) to write to it. Bounce Back finds it on its own.
If anyone is wondering, my ultimate conclusion is this: downloaded and installed "Get Data Back for NTFS AND FAT v3.03" ran program shows all my stuff currently copying to different hdd going to format and put everything back on the drive
