Today I booted up computer to find that my external hard drive wasn't showing up in My Computer. I checked by devices and printers it was there as an unknown disk. Then i noticed the light on my hard drive is blinking which indicates that it has an error. I turn my hard drive off and back on. A notification appears in the corner saying that it cannot recognise the device. It re-installs the drivers fine. I re-check to see if it has appeared in My Computer which it hasn't. I go back to devices and printers in the control panel. It is now detected. "Ext HDD 1021". I then go to Administration Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management where it says that Disk(1) is unallocated and a pop appears saying that I need to initialize the disk, with either MBR or GPT. I know initializing it only changes the signature of the disk but I am unsure whether to and I am assuming I would have to reformat after doing this. I have used multiple recovery tools to retrieve my data, but they were unsuccessful. I have tried it on different operating systems too just in case it was Windows 7. Sorry if this seems a long explanation but I am trying to let you know what i have done so far. Is there any way to save my data or am I screwed? I don't have a back up of it because I am a fool and have learnt my lesson but if you could please help. I would be thankful. Thanks, John.
No! initializing it won't destroy data or partitions it is required for windows to be able to see it,you also select mbr: No you are not screwed the data's still there it looks as tho the disks mbr is stuffed up easeus or minitool have free data & partition recovery software these can see whats there,however partition recovery should only be use as a last resort. You could try a linux live cd of ubuntu & bypass widows for now to see if it can retrieve any data for now all you should be doing is reading the disk,like you say intilizing won't hurt it but if you have to set disk type i.e mbr or gpt this could potentially rewrite partition table & we don't want that just yet tho i suspect there will be no choice,bear in mind my advice is what i would do in your position,right now the data & partitions are there just see if you can strip data off it
if not under warranty then take the drive out of the enclosure & connect directly to the motherboard.
Like I said above I tried using data recovery software (Minitool and icare). For some reason it says it has 0 bits for the capacity and I can obtain any of the data. Why would it say that the capacity is zero? Found myself a tutorial for using linux live to obtain the data. I'll try it and see how it goes. Thanks for your help thus far.
If nothing sees the data or partition table you'll have no choice & initialize i've always found that was necessary before i could begin data retrieval then the software will work that's assuming the housing itself isn't the cause you should remove drive & place it as a slave in the comp,so long as no format is done the partitions will still be there as will the data whether it can be retrieved will depend on what's corrupted distrowatch has a list of all linux software there are a couple of specialist recovery OS's one of them is listed in the righ column called "system rescue",you could just copy & paste that into distrowatch search it'll give a description
nah.. latest puppy linux is what you want.. a noob doesn't have a hope in hell with linux system recovery live... which doesn't have ntfs read/write capabilities anyway.. it's old and for ide based server recovery, and was usually put on a drive on a server as an image as an emergency fallback ssh to shell emergency boot ..... not windoze desktops with usb drives..
