Second HD not accessible in Win 7 (FAT32)

Hi all. I have a second 1tb internal drive in my PC. It's a WD WDC WD10EADS-11M2B1. It's formatted to FAT32 (I did that for accessibility in Linux). It has about 300gb of data on it. It seems to be recognized by my computer just fine in the device manager, but I can't access the data in windows explorer. I've run Western Digitals diagnostic tool on it, and it says it's fine. It shows in Windows disk manager as 1 tb of unallocated space. I know the data is there, I never deleted anything. I hate to send the drive to an expensive data recovery place.

In the disk manager, my C: drive has info displayed, like NTFS and other info. The 1tb WD drive has no data shown.

Please help me access this drive...

Thank you.

**sorry, I should also mention that this HD was part of a WD MyBook Essential external drive. I put the data on it through a USB connection. I have had a ton of trouble getting this drive to be recognized through USB, so I thought I would take the bare drive out of the enclosure and install it as an internal SATA drive.**

 

AFAIK, If it shows as Unallocated that means a partition has not been created.
Kind of weird that you got data on it without creating a partition? :confused

Download and install EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition.
When you run the program it will show you how the drive is configured.

I have just begun to use this program and it looks really good.
I think you may just need to properly set up one (or more) partition(s).
You will probably have to backup / copy that data to other media as creating a partition will Destroy whatever is already there.

 

When I first got the drive, I formatted it to FAT32 and used it just fine for most of a year, although occasionally I had problems getting my PC to detect the drive. I stored data on it, and pulled data from it no problem (when it was connected). My latest problem getting it connected seemed to be permanent. I've tried a million things over the last few weeks, and I just couldn't get my computer to recognize the drive. Right now there's about 300 gb of data on it. Reformatting and partitioning isn't an option, I need the data (baby pictures).

 

Try running PartitionWizard and see if it sees the drive as anything other than unallocated. You aren't doing any recovery operations but just running the program and checking if it sees the drive as unallocated or FAT32. If it sees Fat32 then right-click the Fat32 partition and choose Explore to check if the files are visible to PW.

This is basically the same advice as mjnc but I am not familiar with the Easeus partition program. I know Easeus is a quality program but I have done more operations in PW and feel more comfortable giving directions for that program.

 

Hi charon2112.

I was not suggesting that you format the drive.
Obviously that won't get your data back.

I thought that perhaps examining the drive with something other than Windows Disk management
might provide some useful info.

I was just commenting that what Disk Management is showing you is that it
appears to be a blank drive with no partitions.

Hopefully someone else more knowledgeable about such drive problems can help.

I did a search for WDC WD10EADS-11M2B1 and found the following:
Western Digital WD10EADS-11M2B1 Data Recovery Information

Good Luck