CAn't read WD800 drive

Anyone run into this problem before? Friend of mine gave me this HD to troubleshoot. She states that it was installed in a system as a secondary drive and removed without toughing any of the data when the old computer was put out to pasture. Now she wants to reinstall the drive in a newer system. Well not so fast. It doesn't show.

I installed it as slave in my system and sure enough it's there but it comes up as if it's not partitioned or formated. Also tried it as an external in a USB case. How can I get the files off it without partitioning and losing all the data?

TIA

 

Use a data recovery application. PCInspector is free, it's a bit on the slow side, and a bit confusing to use the first few times (there is a guide though). EasyRecoveryPro is faster, REALLY easy to use, but not free. They do have a trial that will tell you if the data can be recovered or not. If it can, then you can decide to buy it. Here's some links:
PC Inspector http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm
EasyRecoveryPro http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/file-recovery-software/
TestDisk & Recovery (free) http://www.majorgeeks.com/TestDisk_&_PhotoRec_d5561.html
Ultimate Data Recovery (free) http://www.majorgeeks.com/Ultimate_Data_Recovery_d5336.html
I haven't used the last two personally, but they look like they may help. They're free, it can't hurt to try There's many other options in the Major Geeks Data Recovery download section, some are free, and some aren't. Generally speaking, the paid products are faster, and usually easier to use, but feel free to experiment. And let us know how things work out. If you end up recovering the data, please post how you did it so that it may help someone else down the line.

 

No luck so far. PCInspector reports (lost) on fixed disk #2 DRIVE without boot sector.
On to another program I guess.

Have no idea what could have happened when it was removed from the old computer.

 

Does PCInspector give you the option to scan the drive anyway? If so, scan it! Does Windows see the drive and assign it a drive letter? If it has a drive letter, you can run chkdsk from the command prompt and maybe fix the drive that way, or repair the boot sector by booting to your XP CD and running fixboot from the Recovery Console. You can also try one of the other programs listed above. If the data is recoverable, be sure to create a folder on the good hard drive (probably drive C: ) to put the recovered data into.

 

Howdy again,

I now can't PCInspector to read the drive although it does see that a drive exists. I did't think I modified anything. Test Disk has found lots of files which were copied to my main drive however many are corrupted.
It just occured to me that maybe this drive was installed in an old system which used a boot manager for larger drives. Would that be a possiblity because I doubt the owner would have done anything by simply removing it?

This drive isn't that critical since most all the files can be replaced from elsewhere. It's more the challenge but I don't wish to spend hours and hours at it.

 

Absolutely. Back in the day, when Win98 was still new, before Win98SE, many PC's had problems recognizing hard drives larger than 32gb (or was it 38gb?), so there was a bunch of utilities that would create their own 'file system' so the entire capacity of the drive could be utilized. Many of the tools were a nightmare to remove and if the drive was moved and used as a slave drive, many times you could not read it unless the utility was installed on the boot drive also. One of these utilities was called EZDrive, and it worked great, that is when it was working great. When it wasn't working great, the drive usually required a low-level format (aka "zeroing" a drive) in order to use it again without the proprietary 'EZBios'. Nightmare. This could very well be what has happened in your situation. I hate to admit defeat also, but you could try to boot to it in the original PC and see if one of these drive 'helper' utilities is installed; they usually identify themselves at boot time. It could also be that the original PC was retired because of a hard drive problem.
Good luck! :major

 

I believe the size was 32 gb. I did have a system like that a few years ago with 160 G drive in it and it worked fine. I'm almost certain now this is what happened.

The old system that this was in is long gone but I MAY be able to find out more about it. This being a WD drive I expect if that were the case they would use a utility produced by the manufacturer of the drive??

I've got a lot of the files off now. Quite a few are corrupted and will have to be discarded but I'm fairly pleased how the process went just the same.

Thanks for your input.

 

Possibly, but not likely. Most of these types of programs were 3rd party tools installed either by the builder of the PC, or whoever installed the HD. A visit to the Western Digital web site is still a good idea though.