Newbie – How do I reinstall the NTFS to an external hard drive

My 300 gig Seagate hard drive is missing its NTFS file and I am unable to access anything from the drive. I receive the following message THE FILE OR DIRECTORY IS CORRUPTED AND UNREADABLE.

In my computer I right-clicked on the drive letter, clicked on properties, tools, error-checking, Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors, Start. After four attempts all ended with nothing happening, I closed My Computer. Then I right-clicked the My Computer icon and selected Computer Management, then Disk Management. It was black under the File System tab. My C drive is NTFS and my HDDRECOVERY is FAT32.

HELP WHAT DO I DO!?!?!?!? I have 200 GIGS of photographs on that drive and need them desperately

Thank you in advanced for all your help.

 

NTFS and FAT32 are file systems; they tell you how the hard drive partition is formatted.
Tell us what you tried to do. Did you back up a file from an ntfs partition and try to restore it to a fat32 partition???

You can copy files between fat32 and ntfs, but you cannot do a backup-restore between the file system.

If I'm wrong, Im sure someone will be kind enough to correct me.

 

Gary thank you for answering my question.

I did not know there was a difference between a system file and software. I had transferred pictures from my laptop to the external drive as I do weekly. When I tired to open the drive the next morning I was unable to. I have no idea what I did to cause the drive to crash. I called Seagate and they walked me through the My Computer info and determined that the NTFS/FAT32 files no longer were on the drive. I hope that answers your question. As you can tell, I have almost no experience diagnosing or repairing my drive issue.

I use that hard drive for my back up and had no problems with it until this past transfer. IF I am able to access the drive again I will put everything on the drive on DVD's and reformat the drive or toss it.

I have no idea how to correct it. All the restore/recovery software I looked into do not say anything about reinstalling the system file (NTFS/FAT32). They just state that they will be able to restore the files, which I cannot access and hope are still there.

Thank you again

 

Not having any idea what was done, there is no way we can help. It's going to take some hands-on diagnosis by someone with the required diagnostic software

Best bet is to take it to a reputabletech in your area.

Sorry, but I just cannot help

 

Hi Carol,

It sounds like you used your external harddrive before this to back up things on a weekly basis and it worked fine. This time, when you moved your pictures over it caused your external harddrive to crash. Was this the first time you attempted to move pictures? What types of files had you moved before this successfully? Did you move them by simply pulling them across through Windows Explorer? Was the external harddrive new?

Most files can be recovered; sometimes it requires money.

abri

 

Good Morning Abri

I purchased the external hard drive in September 2005 and have transferred the pictures via pulling them from the folder on my laptop into the folder on the hard drive (Windows Explorer?). I must have done it this way hundreds of times without any problems.

I am sure there will be a price to pay to get the NTFS back on it. I just do not know how to go about it. My main concern is, if the pictures are still on the drive, doing something to cause more damage to them. I have no experience repairing issues like this but I am eager to learn or obtain enough knowledge to know if a "tech" knows what they are doing.

Thank you Abri

 

Try your recovery Cd as I'm pretty sure that NTFS is compatible with both FAT32 & Fat16 systems.
If you can manage to recover your data you can then re-format the drive with NTFS....... BUT DON'T RE-FORMAT BEFORE YOU HAVE RECOVERED OR YOU WILL LOSE ALL THE DATA.
I'm at a loss to understand how copying files over could have damaged the NTFS as it must have been intact to have copied the files over in the first place.

 

Carol D,
I am sure, that if your hard drive was able to accept photos correctly before, that what you are experiencing now is NOT irreparable. The question is ... how should you proceed. Is there any way for you to go backwards to before you pullled the last pics across. Also, there are some recovery softwares. My favorite remains "Easy Recovery", but there are are some others here at Majorgeeks. Still, i would wait for a bit for someone with more experience in this area to advise you, before you turn to recovery software.
abri

 

Thank you all for being so helpful and your wonderful suggestions.

I too am totally baffled as to how I lost the NTSF. Transferring files from one drive to another via dragging and dropping has never caused any problems or had any negative effect in the past.

The external hard did not come with a recovery CD just a driver CD. I am hesitant to recover it as a laptop or tower and do not think I would be able to install any software without the NTSF/FAT32 system file. At any rate I have not been able to do anything with it. Hopefully better minds than mine will be able to figure it out.

 

Try using PCInspector available for free in the Data Recovery section right here at MajorGeeks. I've used it before and it works. A bit slow sometimes, but it can save most 'lost' data. As mentioned above, EasyRecovery is great data recovery software, but it's not free. There are tools that allow you to reactivate partitions (both NTFS and FAT32) without destroying data. Check in the Drive Utilites section... GOOD LUCK!!! Post your results!

hoppperdave2000

 

Hi Carol_D
Have you tried to use the windows own tests for errors? To test your external hard drive, you should be able to go to Windows Explorer and right click on the letter for your external drive. Go to properties and then to the second tab which is called Extras on my computer. It may be called tools or something else in yours. There should be two choices on that tab, one of them to check the drive for errors and the other to defrag. Do not run the defrag!! I think it would be useful to run the check for errors. Do not hit the defrag button by mistake, because you do not want to do ANYTHING with your affected hard drive, that could write over the data you're trying to save. If you have any questions, please ask before trying anything. It would be good if someone could verify my instructions who has an English-language computer. There are slight differences in how mine is set up.
abri