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  1. Member ranchhand's Avatar
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    This is a strange one. I have a 160 gig Seagate harddrive that I was using as a slave backup drive and Explore will not see it. I had a computer crash (reason still unknown) and immediately after that my problem started.

    My BIOS recognizes it and posts all the specifics-Number, cylinders, 160 gig capacity, etc. I can go into Computer Management/Disk Management and it is listed. However, it is registered there as Uallocated Space, meaning it has no partition. Really? That's strange since I formatted it in NTFS and have several gigs of video files stored there. I have thrown everything I can think of at that drive, and nada. I hooked it to another computer and that computer does not read it either. Linux Knoppix reads it and recognizes it, but I cannot move any data off of it. I finally got Knoppix to copy one directory over to my good drive, but when I opened my Explore it wasn't there even though I registered 3 gigs less on my good drive. So something took up 3 gigs and I cannot find it on my good drive!!!

    I tried PC Inspector file recovery, and it will not see the drive.

    So there you have it. A drive that is seen but cannot be accessed.

    Anyone have any suggestions?
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  2. Member Krispy Kritter's Avatar
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    The fix would be to right click on the drive in Disk Management and initialize the drive. The data is most likely already lost, especially if Knoppix can't even copy off valid data.
    Google is your Friend
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  3. Member
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    Jun 2003
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    You could try Active Partition Recovery.
    The demo version will let you see if it can recover your data, but you'd need to pay for the full version to be able to actually recover it.
    It's saved my bacon more than once in a similar situation.
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  4. Member Xylob the Destroyer's Avatar
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    Sep 2004
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    FileScavenger can see and read drives that Windows will no longer recognize...
    Good luck.
    "To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research." - Steven Wright
    "Megalomaniacal, and harder than the rest!"
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  5. Member zoobie's Avatar
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    I just went thru this a few months ago. When the computer crashes and you have a video application open, it sometimes changes the format the slave. It may have copied over but in an unreadable format like RAW. Now you're stuck with the file recovery scams. All I can suggest is to try the free ones first starting with testdisk.
    http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
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  6. aBigMeanie aedipuss's Avatar
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    Oct 2005
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    zoobie..... nice fiction. but if a computer just crashes while writing to a drive what happens is bad sectors and overwritten data, not a chance in hell of a "format" change. for all anyone can know the computer crash might have been caused by a power surge that fried the hard drive controller board. if so it's just toast. try the failure identification software most manufacturers have available on their website - usually in support/troubleshooting.
    --
    "a lot of people are better dead" - prisoner KSC2-303
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  7. Member ranchhand's Avatar
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    Thanks all, if I get joy I will let you know.
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  8. Member zoobie's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by aedipuss
    not a chance in hell of a "format" change
    oh...ok
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  9. Member
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    If the pc can see the drive , yet appears empty , try drive rescue : http://woundedmoon.org/win32/driverescue19d.zip
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  10. Member ranchhand's Avatar
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    I know this is late, but I promised you guys that I would let you know how this turned out. Actually I learned a lot so it was very beneficial. As you know my problem was a corrupted partition, not corrupted OS. This gets very dicey. Well, I tried Knoppix, but traditionally Knoppix will read NTFS, but not write NTFS. So I was stumped.

    I had an old drive that I formatted to FAT32. So I managed to drag & drop my smaller video files under 4 gigs onto the FAT32 drive. But because of the FAT32 4-gig file limit, all my large files could not be transferred-Knoppix would start copying, then suddenly as it hit 4 gigs would stall out with an ambiguous error message. Every time. Then, after a lot of searching, I learned how to mount Knoppix 5.1.1 so that it will WRITE to NTFS as well. Yippppee! I formatted the same target drive in NTFS, and dragged and dropped 41.6 gigs of files, complete folders and nested folders even, and it copied every one onto the target drive. I fired up Pinnacle and it imported and played every file just like nothing had ever happened, video, sound, menus, everything.

    So this story has a happy ending and I really learned a lot. I thought you might be interested.
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