Recover Unallocated Partition on Xternal Drive

Hi. My main internal hard drive expired unexpectedly, but in a complete and spectacular fashion. Still not sure what happened, but was not too bothered as all my important and unreplaceable data was backed up on my external drive (baby pictures, music collection, etc.).

I threw in another hard drive I had lying round (had Windows 98 on it) and tried to install WIN XP Pro from the CD.

I managed to do this OK, but when I tried to find my external drive it's not there. Computer Management lets me see the disk but it's got a black line underneath which says it's unallocated.

Anyone know how to restore or make a new partition without completly loosing these files?. I've searched all the topics that I can find of the forum, but really don't know what I'm doing, so decided to seek advice before really screwing it up.

Thanks for your help.
Aaron.

 

Somehow the MBR / partition tables on the external must have become corrupted. Needless to say all recovery actions are dangerous.

Below someone who had similar type of issue and who fixed it.

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=185922

Prior to attempting this, I would try to copy your data off the drive and to this end would suggest using Puppy Linux which may (probably) be able to read the data.

See post below as to how to do this.

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=187443

There are other avenues which can be followed for data retrieval some swear by Data Doctor. You may even use the suggestion made by the user in the top post ie Partition Find & Mount.

Good Luck

 

Thanks for your reply and help. I will give it a go and post results, successful or otherwise!

Cheers
A.

 

if its a maxtor or seagate try maxblast 5. it has a recovery option. dunno if it will work or not for you, but you can try it.

 

Hi all.

I used Partition find and Mount programme and it has come up with "found partition 1 at 250G not mounted." . This is the total size of the drive.

Now, I really don't want to screw this up so I am bothering you for more advice. If I click "Mount As" will this simply partition the drive, effectively allowing me to use the drive again as normal, but erasing all the data that I know is still on there?

My instinct is to mount the drive, and this will allow me access to the files, but I really don't know.

As you may have guessed, I really don't know what I'm doing!!

Thanks for all your help.
A.

 

Wow. Now I'm really confused. :confused

Find and Mount allowed me to copy some files from the external drive to my new internal drive, however with 184 G of files and a 15 G internal drive, copying all of my data to the hard drive or DVD's/CD's is impossible. I tried to make sense of BootIt, but reading the manual left me with no idea of how to even install the software, never mind use it.

If there is a way of doing this that is easy to understand, please, please let me know what it is.

Thanks.
A.

 

Well, got it all sorted in the end. Used Active@ Partition recovery software and had the drive back in full use in no time.

Thanks again for the help and suggestions.

A.

 

congrats you got your data restored but i was having the same problem with my HDD fortunately i find a tool Stellar Phoenix Partition Recovery Software really very nice and effective.i got my data and files back and restored good tool.