Hard Drive not listed in My Computer..

[Nilgni]

I can see this hard drive in the BIOS, Partition Magic and Administrative Tools Disk Management, but it does not show up in the My Computer Window.

I tried it on two other pc's via an external usb connection and it does the same thing there.

The drive is a 250Gig Western Digital and I ran the Diagnostic CD that was supplied with it. It tests okay?

I have a few screen shots that show the drive (listed as disk 4 in screenshots below). I have about 10,000 songs and 30 taped movies on this drive and I am trying to save them. I don't mind formatting the drive if I can get the contents off.

Thanks,
Keith


Disk Management Screenshot

Partition Magic 8.0 Screenshot

 

[micker377]

Well, Windows sees it as all free space. P.M. says it is "bad". Looks like nothing can "see" the root info on it. You should "Google" for a recovery program.

 

[firewolfrl]

about the best you are going to do is a recovery program
you have lost the MBR of the drive
unplug the drive till you have all your ducks in a row
get the recovery program

do this as though you only have one shot...that may be true

when you do this make sure the drive is being cooled down have a fan blow on it directly as this will be a time consuming process and heat will be a huge issue on stability
a desk fan and open case work great...plan on if you have issues in the recovery process of 6 to 20 hours

you need a second drive to store the data you recover

plan on spending money... you are not gonna be able to do this Scott free.
The quality data recovery software have a decent price tag to them but they are worth the cost versus sending to a lab

http://www.download.com/File-Disk-Management/3150-2248_4-0.html?tag=dir

as for the link above you can refine the search with key words like "corrupt hard drive" or "bad MBR

Do not do the shareware route and not be able to do the full capability of the recovery program....if you do that and the drive gives up on you because you were in a test mode that would really suck

SO, You have to go the full route for any recovery software you use and pay for the full program so you can follow the one shot rule


and after you are done zero the drive


but, if it were me ....nice fridge magnets and the platters make great coasters

I don't mess around with drives that fail the way yours did


after I post this I hope there is a whole slew of posts that give great links to recovery software that work good and can help you.

 

[jvannatter]

Try this move this drive into a machine that doesnt have any other Hard drives in it. Boot from a windows XP cd and get to a dos prompt. At that point try the fixmbr command. Hopefully it will detect that you have an unformatted drive in the machine and assign it a drive letter. If it does you should be good to go with the fixmbr command

 

[vacunita]

Wow, A Terabyte Drive I'm impressed.

Seriously:
I think the Partition table from your drive got corrupted.
The Fact that Parition Magic says its bad and
Windows tells you it has a 811.57GB partition in there.
Along with 3 others of varying sizes are good clues of this.

Try using a recovery program like
GetDataBack from runtime.org. to salvage the data. Before attempting any other repair.


----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[firewolfrl]

jvannatter
the fix MBR works in a normal situation
I fear SkyChief will lose further index data if SkyChief goes that route

SkyChief should not do too much to the drive otherwise he is going to lose all the data on the drive


its best to recover the data first then try to play with the drive