Unallocated external hard drive in WINDOWS XP SP2

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

hi!

well i’ve been using my WD SES hard drive on WINDOWS VISTA (32 bit) for almost 4 years and had no problem at all. now i’ve installed WINDOWS XP SP2 (32 bit) for some reasons.

after installing WIN XP, my WD hard drive does’t appear in my computer while showed up in DEVICE MANAGER with UNALLOCATED description.

when right click on drive, there is no available option for changing DRIVE LETTER etc which usually appear with other drives like C etc. it only displays three options i.e NEW PARTITION, HELP.

further i tried to use the NEW PARTITION option but at last it offer FORMAT which is obviously not the last option as all my data is on that drive which is very very important.

i think, the software which unlock the drive is now not available after trying NEW PARTITION option.

i would really really appriciate if there is any cure.

thanks,

sohail.

2

Hello,

If the drive says Unallocated in disk management it means the partition is either corrupted or was deleted. You will have to format this drive in order to use it again. Formatting the drive will delete all data stored on it. However, it may be possible to still extract the data utilizing data recovery software. Western Digital does not provide data recovery software. However, there are several kinds of Data Recovery software available. If you do a web search for “Data Recovery” it will yield plenty of data recovery software options.