Hard Drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter MichaelN
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MichaelN

I have an old computer with 2 hard drives running Windows 2000. I
believe they are both SCSI.

My C: drive is a Healthy Boot NTFS (Disk 0) and working fine. It is
only 9.32 GB. I said it was old!

My other drive (Disk 1) is the problem. Part of it is Healthy
(active) with a primary partition of 9.32 GB. It is mirroring my c:
drive. It has no drive letter assigned to it.

The rest of the Disk 1 drive is 47.9 GB and contains some important
storage files that I would like to access (but not enough to spend the
$$$ for data recovery, as I have backups of the important ones). It
used to be my d: drive, but something happened and it no longer shows
up in Windows Explorer. Computer Management shows it is Unallocated.

Anyway, the files are still there, according to R-Studio. Does anyone
know how I should partition/ assign a drive letter so I can access the
files in Windows Explorer, or at least make the unallocated portion of
the drive accessible again?

Thanks in advance.
 
MichaelN said:
Anyway, the files are still there, according to R-Studio. Does anyone
know how I should partition/ assign a drive letter so I can access the
files in Windows Explorer, or at least make the unallocated portion of
the drive accessible again?
Click to expand...

If it's showing as "unallocated" I'm not sure if you can safely turn it
into a formatted partition and get the data back.

You might want to try a file recovery program such as the freeware:

http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/download.htm?language=1#

I had a similar problem recently and this recovered 90% of my files.
 
Great! Thank you very much. I'll try that.

btw, do you have any suggestions on how to make the unallocated space
useable again?
 
Michael said:
Great! Thank you very much. I'll try that.

btw, do you have any suggestions on how to make the unallocated space
useable again?
Click to expand...

You can go into Disk Management (R-click My Computer, select <Manage>,
select >Disk management>). It should show up as unallocated space and
you should be able to create and format a partition which will recover
the space.

However, doing that will basically lose any files that may still be on
it so you want to exhaust all possibilities for file recovery first.
 
I have an old computer with 2 hard drives running Windows 2000. I
believe they are both SCSI.

My C: drive is a Healthy Boot NTFS (Disk 0) and working fine. It is
only 9.32 GB. I said it was old!

My other drive (Disk 1) is the problem. Part of it is Healthy
(active) with a primary partition of 9.32 GB. It is mirroring my c:
drive. It has no drive letter assigned to it.

The rest of the Disk 1 drive is 47.9 GB and contains some important
storage files that I would like to access (but not enough to spend the
$$$ for data recovery, as I have backups of the important ones). It
used to be my d: drive, but something happened and it no longer shows
up in Windows Explorer. Computer Management shows it is Unallocated.

Anyway, the files are still there, according to R-Studio. Does anyone
know how I should partition/ assign a drive letter so I can access the
files in Windows Explorer, or at least make the unallocated portion of
the drive accessible again?

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

MichaelN: A better freeware for your problem might be Testdisk 6.7:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_6.7_Release

It's written specifically to recover lost partitions. It worked great
for me restoring large-capacity disks corrupted by not having
EnableBigLBA installed in my W2K system. Runs in command mode.

PCFile Recovery and the numerous other file recovery programs focus
only on retrieving files inadvertently deleted by the user, and
typically can't find files inside a lost partition.
 
zeke7 said:
PCFile Recovery and the numerous other file recovery programs focus
only on retrieving files inadvertently deleted by the user, and
typically can't find files inside a lost partition.
Click to expand...

PC Inspector will find lost/deleted/damaged partitions and the files
they contain which was precisely why I recommended it in this instance.
 
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