Removed Esata drive and replaced with another drive. New drive is now unus

[cal_tony]

Without paying much attention, I removed an Esata Drive partitioned fat 32 with another drive formatted NTFS. The original drive was not released by the system and plugging in the new drive confused something and the new drive did not show up correctly in My computer[Win xp]. My computer still showed the new drive as the old drive. I removed the new drive and replugged it and the new drive still showed up as the old drive. I thought I would use check disk to see if it was a simple problem with the drive. check disk found sector errors and did not fix the problem.

Now the disk that was NTFS shows up as formatted in fat and although my computer still shows the correct size for the drive [1 tb with 8gb free] no files are visible in a number of undelete file programs that I tried to see the drive with.

I thought of using Glary to convert the Fat format back to NTFS and see if that would enable me to see if anything useable was left on the drive but I also thought I might ask here for any suggestions re: salvaging any files still on the disk.

Tony

[KBeee]

You could try putting the original FAT32 drive back in and re-booting the computer - hopefully this'd get you back to "as was". Then when the computer has the correct info about the drive, hot-swap properly, or even better (WinXP always messed up for me trying to hot-swap), shut down, insert the new NTSF drive and boot up.

[cal_tony]

Have done that previously when it had happened once before and everything was fine. This time[maybe because I used the chkdisk utility] the ntfs drive is somehow imprinted with the fat32 filesys. I've tried a number of utilities to find anything on the disk and nothing shows up. A program to change the fat to NTFS only begins and indicates that the file system is corrupted and it cannot continue.

This whole hot swapping Esata drives does on occasion cause a problem when the old drive doesn't get removed. The last time this happened I looked online for a Esata utility that would force the removed drive to be disconnected much like the windows utility for USB drives but couldn't find one. Maybe I should have looked a little harder.

Right now, I don't know what to do about the drive. I have about 1tb of videos that I converted from my dvd collection to H264 mkvs. I have all the old disks but it took a long time to convert them over and I'm not that enthused about doing it all over again if there is still a chance to salvage files from the drive.

Tony

[KBeee]

I stopped trying to hotswap Esata HDD's on my XP machine, because most of the time it was OK, then it'd suddenly fail on me for no apparent reason. Fortunately my back-ups were up to date.
Best of luck recovering your data.

[cal_tony]

Right now I,m on another computer. The one that has the problem Esata connected to it has been running since early this morning. It's been re-converting the fat to NTFs cluster by cluster. When it's done in a day or so i'll know if useable data is still on the disk.

I have had the same problem as you mentioned on occasion but since all but one of my hard disks are NTFS any problem fixes itself with a short ckdisk. Sine the offending disk this time was fat, I suppose it's a whole different problem. Evidently the initial cure for this problem would have been to go into one of my partition managers and re-assign the fat designation to NTFS before doing anything.

If anyone knows of a utility like the safely remove disk in XP for USB, please let me know.

Tony

[Seeker47]

This won't help with your particular problem, but I have three eSATA drives -- each in its own external drive shell -- which I move around as extra, external storage amongst a few similar computers. To be more specific, I'm running 32-bit XP and this

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:eek:ffic...ed=0CDYQ8wIwAQ

has been my preferred enclosure. I assume by 'hot swap' you mean a plug / unplug while the HDD is still running. I rarely do that, even if it's supposed to be o.k., which may have something to do with my not having run into this problem. When I flip the ON switch for the enclosure, the drive has not been seen 100% of the time -- more like 80%. Sometimes I've had to power the enclosure down (and I've tried several brands and models of such enclosures, this being the best of the lot that I've found to date), reconnect all connectors, power up the enclosure again, and then the HDD is seen. Can't recall it taking more than two tries. That suggests to me that this eSATA deal is not an automatic slam dunk. Nevertheless, it is tremendously useful, and beats the hell out of USB 2.0.

Per some stuff I'm reading, eSATA seems to be going away, replaced by USB-3, or some new spec combo plug ? I like eSATA a lot, and hope to continue using it for quite awhile, whatever the current market may be doing. (Manufacturers may change what they are making and selling, either arbitrarily or for their own bottom line, but that doesn't mean we always have to follow right along in lockstep.)

It seems like you've already tried a different computer, or mounting the drive inside the computer. Sorry I don't have any better ideas for you.

[aedipuss]

in order for esata to work properly the drive must always be powered on before connecting the data cable.