Hard Drive Problems

12-16-07 | ps

[perfect stranger]

My 200gig HD is partitioned as 2 drives, one for the OS and one for storage.

Friday night I put the 200 into an external HD enclosure and since then the second partition will not show up.

Is there a way to get that information back?

[perfect stranger]

Thanks for your help.

[jdm]

Pinging ShadowAce for you. He’s an excellent FReeper who’s been of great help to me in the past. Perhaps he can assist here.

[puppypusher]

Seems to me that this hard drive was an internal drive recognised by the system as Drive “C”.

When you disconnected it and changed it into an external drive you changed the way the BIOS would recognise it. The only way I can see you clearing up this problem is by going into the bios and telling it the external drive is your boot drive.

It also matters where on the drive cable the internal drive is located but I think checking the Bios would be a start.

Good luck.

[perfect stranger]

Seems to me that this hard drive was an internal drive recognised by the system as Drive “C”.

Yes, it was. Now it's connected as a slave drive and the other partition does not show.

[puppypusher]

If I’m correct I don’t think you will find the other partition unless the Original boot partition is the original drive C:\..

Drive “C” cannot be listed as a slave drive.Since it is the main boot drive.

The only way to find out is to replace the drive the way it was prior to the changes you made.

If you find the sub-partition after the change you will know the data is still there but you won’t be able to access it unless the drives are in their proper order.

[ShadowAce]

You haven't mentioned te OS on this drive. The OS can make a great difference in how you created the partitions and thus whether you will be able to see them once another OS boots up.

[perfect stranger]

Drive “C” cannot be listed as a slave drive.Since it is the main boot drive.

That's true.

[perfect stranger]

OS = XP

[ThomasThomas]

I would use disk manager to look at it since it is XP

right click my computer.

disk management.

[antiRepublicrat]

Don't Touch!

Anything you do can screw up your chances of getting your data back. Go get a file recovery program like File Scavenger. Free demo to see if it works, $49 to buy. It will scan your whole hard drive (may take a while) and copy any data it's found to a new hard drive. As long as you haven't touched anything, you will probably recover close to 100% of your files, if not all of them.

[Tribune7]

The data should be there. There is disk recovery software that should work for getting it back. For a Mac, I recommend Disk Warrior.

[rabscuttle385]

See Comment 9 from ThomasThomas. You need to check to see if Windows is even noticing the second partition on the drive. Perhaps Windows did not assign a drive letter to the second partition and you would not see it show up in the Explorer shell (in "My Computer").

Comment 5 from puppypusher is also okay. Return the hardware back to its original configuration. If the second partition shows up, make a backup first, and then make your changes.

Obviously, since the first partition is still showing up, I am going to assume that the drive platters and electronics are still working fine, in which case, your data is still there (unless you did something really dumb like overwrite the second partition with a new partition and new data).

Hopefully, the lesson learned is to always make (and test) a backup copy of any data that you can't stand losing, before making significant hardware and software changes.

[yhwhsman]

When you put it in the external casing, were you supposed to change the jumper so this is a slave drive? This connects by usb doesn't it?

[perfect stranger]

You need to check to see if Windows is even noticing the second partition on the drive. Perhaps Windows did not assign a drive letter to the second partition and you would not see it show up in the Explorer shell (in "My Computer").

If Windows was noticing the second partition this thread wouldn't be here.

Return the hardware back to its original configuration.

If that worked I wouldn't be asking.

[perfect stranger]

The external drive connects by USB and the jumper position in that drive should not matter.

[papasmurf]

Right. Don't touch. Don't boot it up anymore. Each time you do, you place the data it contains at risk.

Go to GRC.com, and procure SpinRite. Nothing on the planet can recover as throughly as SpinRite does. It's used by the FBI, NSA, and many others, including tons of Police Depts for forensic analyses and evidence gathering.

Steve Gibson is the father of data recovery and one of the finest in the world.

Watch HIS VIDEO Here BEFORE you buy or use anything.

[ThomasThomas]

Disk manager is not part of Explorer it is part of system tools. It looks at physical drives and shows how they a partitioned including usb drives. It will see the drive space even if it dose not have a letter assigned.

[Varmint Al]

It could be that the old C: Drive is now called the D: drive and the logical partition that was called the D: drive has a new drive letter assigned to it. You can use C:\WINDOWS\system32\diskmgmt.msc to view all of the drives and actually assign new letters to them.

Good Hunting... from Varmint Al

[shield]

bfl

[rabscuttle385]

Disk manager is not part of Explorer it is part of system tools. It looks at physical drives and shows how they a partitioned including usb drives. It will see the drive space even if it dose not have a letter assigned.

I know that. I have used the disk partition tools in NT family operating systems since version 3.5. The system's disk management tools will see the entire physical drive and all its constituent partitions, however if a FAT16/32 or NTFS partition is *not* assigned a drive letter (in a Unix or Unix-like system, the equivalent is that the partition is not mounted properly) then the partition will not be visible in Explorer (or to any other user shells).

Does this clear up things a bit?