Hello all, I am looking for and would be grateful for any assistance with correcting an issue with a External hard drive that has changed for reasons unknown to me.
On a Dell 8400 Desk Top (OS = WIN XP Pro) I have been using:
Three individual external Western Digital 1TB USB hard drives. (all are WD My Book Essentials # WDH1U10000N) All have been working fine for almost a year. They were working as: MaxStore_#1 (I:)
MaxStore_#2 (G:)
MaxStore_#3 (H:) #1 & #2 are still working fine. #3 now shows as Local Disk (H:) and is not accessible. The same happens if I move the drive to a laptop.
After clicking on the drive using Windows Explorer, it takes a few moments and then a window appears - The disk in drive H is not formatted. Do you want to format it now? In Computer management the drive shows:
Volume = (H:)
Layout = Partition
Type = Basic
File System = blank (It was formatted as NTFS when put into service)
Status = Healthy
Capacity = 931.51 GB
Free Space = 931.51 GB
% Free - 100%
Fault Tolerance = No
Overhead = 0%
Note: Saving the drive is of secondary importance. Saving what is on the drive is Paramount. It is 90% full of data that I would hate to loose.
I took a look at the thread (#6) and I am excited about giving Testdisk a try. However, that can only happen later today as I must wait till I get home from work. But it sounds promising. A donation to CG Security is definitley in order if things work out. I’ll let you (& others) know just as soon as I learn the results.
So Joe, Everything that was on my hard drive was totally replaceable, it would have just taken an extremely long time. So I treaded lightly in my attempts. I spent a few days over on cgsecuirty.org reading about the use of testdisk. Once I felt secure in what I needed to perform I pushed forward. I was able to recover every bit of 921gb of my precious files. The copy process from one external to another was time consuming but worth every moment. I followed the steps found under Documentation - Using Testdisk - Recover Deletd Files From NTFS Partition.
I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to read my post and then suggest that I try TestDisk. My next step is to jump back over to cgsecurity.org and make a donation. I would have spent a great deal of money to save that data. So a donation for the use of TestDisk will be one of the best Bargins I have every purchased. -Many A Great Thanks- CrummBumm (a.k.a. Sonny)
