What's On This Hdd ?

I'm curious about a HDD that I have acquired

It's a WD black 320GB 9.5mm SATA

I'm connecting it as an external drive though a USB 2 port via a (generic) bridging adaptor. the disk is powered from an Antec VP450 PSU. Seatools gives it an excellent bill of health.

Now, when I connect it, the USB system recognizes it, and I get the message about installing and ready to use, but it doesn't show in my computer. It shows in Disk management, as 298GB, online, healthy, and a single partition. It's the active partition - filled with diagonal lines. But nowhere does it give format information, not 'unallocated', not 'NTFS', not 'FAT' etc. The File System entry and volume label entry in the top part of the Disk Management display are both empty (blank).

I've also got easeUS Partition manager (free version). That gives three or four partitions, the one at the start of the disk being 7.84MB in size, and unallocated.

I'd be interested in seeing if there are extant files in the main partition shown by Easeus PM (if this is real), what they are etc.

Can anyone put this information into a coherent picture ?

Dumb_Question
1.March.2017
HP Pavilion dm4, 8GB RAM, Windows 7

 

It seems to be a Linux disk formatted Ext2, 3 or 4 (or some other Linux format) which Windows cannot natively read. Are you able to boot from this drive if plugged in when you restart the computer?

 

Thank you for your response, mdonah. That sounds plausible but I have no way of checking until I can 'repair' my other computer (WIP) !

Is it not plausible that what I am seeing is the result of a Windows quick format ?

Is the default format method from Windows 7 (presumably it did have W7, but maybe W8 or W10) a quick format ? Yes, I think so. But it seems that only one logical drive (partition) at a time can be formatted at once: it's unlikely that any format would have been done on the first partition (that which includes sector 0). If the physical drive was the same as the logical drive only the first sectors would have been erased, and the structure of the disk would look different in easeus PM (but the same in Windows Disk management). So it seems that mdonah's suggestion fits the best.

Dumb_Question
2.March.2017

 

You may be able to access that drive from within Windows by using R-Linux.

http://www.r-tt.com/free_linux_recovery/

 

That might be useful to know, thanks.

If I can't boot from that drive, I've Linux on flash drive which is bootable, so by booting into that and then plugging the disk-under-test into another USB slot, maybe I can read it. But I understand you have to 'mount' the DUT, as it won't be recognized automatically, and I'll have to read up on how to do that....

Both these require that I require that I get my other PC running though.

Dumb_Question
2.March.2017