My wife's friend was having a bunch of computer problems and it was all at the expense of limewire, 4 kids and about a 2 year old computer that had never been reformatted.

So I tell them that the only real way to fix their computer is to start over. Which I got the pleasure of doing.

So I install a hard drive to back up all of their stuff to. Pictures, music, documents, etc. etc. I plugged in the hard drive, fired up windows and windows saw the hard drive. No problems. Copied over the files to the hard drive I just installed. Verified all the files were on that drive.

I then turn off the machine and unplug that hard drive. Both power on IDE. Turn the computer back on and do the restore. Once the restore is complete and all the drivers and software is up to date, I turn the computer back off again to re-attach the hard drive. Re-attach the drive and turn the computer back on. Open up explorer and the drive is not there. Went into the bios, shows up there. Went into device manager and it shows up there.

Why is it showing up in all those places and not showing up in explorer? I have stuff on that drive that I really can not lose.

The first time I hooked it up, I piggybacked it off the cd drive. I thought that maybe that was my issue, so I disconnected the CD drive and just connected the hard drive to the master part of the cable. Nothing there.

I did notice something wierd that I have never seen before. They have one sata hard drive that is in Raid-0.. Or at least that is what it is showing in the boot device screen. Maybe that is my problem? I don't know..

Help!!!

 

Is the drive showing up in disk manager?

 

Do you have another computer you can test the drive in?

 

+1

 

since you reformatted the pc it lost all the drivers for the HD controllers. Check the motherboard brand and model and download the drivers for the IDE controller. If its a branded pc, for example a DELL, just plug in the service tag in dell's support and download the right software/driver for it....hopefully this fixes it.

 

+2

if its in disk management, it may not be getting a drive letter, in which case you can right click and choose assign drive letter and pick whatever letter, doesn't matter.

 

agree with coykiam... Same thing happened when I did my reformat 3 years ago... 7 hours later and I realized I didn't have driver support for driver over 500gb... -_-

 

took teh words out of my mouth

 

Punt.

 

It is in disk management. I will try assigning it a letter. Hope it works. Ill update when I get home to try it. But first I will try the driver thing.

Thanks for the help.

 

you sure its a hard drive?

 

May seem obvious, but in Disk Management DO NOT format it. Obviously this will do bad things to your ability to retrieve the data easily.

 

God I hope you don't have one of those partition extenders for LBA.

A RAID 0 array with 1 drive. Yeah, that's about right, too.

 

It will show in Disk Management whether it has a drive letter or not like so. All my partitions have drive letters except one but that's cause that one isn't in the NTFS or FAT32 format I think it's HFS+



If you didn't have drivers for it then it wouldn't be recognized in the device manager or disk management, it's say some sort of unknown device with the yellow question mark next to it. I'm almost 100% positive it's cause you don't have a driver letter for it.

 

The last thing I am going to do is format it.

I tried assigning a letter to it and I do not have that ability. Ill take a screen shot of it in a few minutes.

Yes Whiskers, it is a hard drive.

 

Is it in the NTFS or FAT32 format?

 

^^ For whatever reason it is showing unformated...

Which does not really make sense because the first time I plugged it in, it recognized the drive. I copied stuff to it and now it is gone.

 

Now my comment doesn't seem so stupid, does it?...

All kidding aside, it sounds like the file system has been jacked (technical term). The files are probably fine. If you want, send me the drive and I will get the files back for you. No guarantees, but it sounds like the MFT or FAT were corrupted, which is an easy fix for me...

If you decide to try some of the free programs on the internet to recover deleted files, you may jack it beyond my ability to grab the files. They tend to be destructive in their processes, however if I can't recover the data, feel free to use all the programs you want. My process is not destructive.

PM me if you want to send me the drive.

 

PM sent.

 

USB External drives are THE SHIT for stuff like this.

 

Hindsight is always 20/20

 

All your USB external is is an internal IDE/SATA drive with a USB controller.

 

in disk management, does your OS drive report being NTFS?

 

VICTORY IS MINE!

PM Sent back.

Data should ship tomorrow, SwervinCL.

 

Whew, I was 0/2 for Azine users for some reason. Glad this one hits the "Win" column...

 

 

 

Probably only because it was full of pr0n.

 

...and so is google. Next time do some research before you start your project and you may save yourself some headaches.

 

:thief: