External hard drive- data disappeared!

I have a 'pre-built' external hard drive, a Seagate 200gb USB unit. It has worked for me faithfully and has been dependable. . . until about an hour ago! Yesterday, I had backed up about 15gb of data for a lady, then I formatted her hard drive and reloaded XP Pro (a very nasty rootkit was the cause). So, I'm all set to copy the backed up data over to her PC; I plug in the external hard drive, Windows says "GLONK!" and I got the 'New Hardware' balloon messages. So far, so good. So I went to do some other things and I came back after about 7 minutes and open My Computer, and the external is not listed! So I go to the Disk Management console and it shows the external as being "Unallocated". WHAAAA!?!?!?! This tells me the partition table has been corrupted, deleted, changed, whatever. Anyway, the point of this lengthy and undoubtedly boring thread is that I used an AWESOME little freeware program called Partition Find & Mount. The name says it all. It does a quick scan, finds your 'missing' drive and mounts the partition as a virtual drive. It worked PERFECTLY!! :celebrate I was able to copy all the data I needed (there is still over 100gb of customer back ups on this HD rolleyes ) and I went from almost dying (either a massive heart attack or by drowning in a pool of my own tears) to dancing around like a hippie on peyote at a Grateful Dead concert. :dancer

To sum it up: the program Partition Find & Mount saved the day..... BIG TIME!!!

[dlb]

 

Any recovery tool that works is great to know about. Thanks for mentioning this one. Hopefully when I need it, I will remember I have it.
hmmmm, maybe I need to paste a note on my external hard drive I'm having an increase in senior moments!

 

One thing I should mention.... when you mount the 'missing' drive, by default the program selects drive B:. Personally, I don't like drive B:. If you have 2 floppies, or a RAM drive, or whatever, it may be problematic, but then again, I always changed it to drive X: or drive R:.

Why R: and/or X:? :confused


Who knows. But it worked freekin' beautifully!!!!

:-D

 

Nice find, amazing all the software here, now if I could just remember all the info I gleam from here I would be really happy. btw I always find your problems/solutions interesting

 

Good to know. My husband's floppy died and I have a USB external floppy hooked up for him for at least 2 years. It is B:.