Slave Hard Drive Trouble

[barryrs]

I recently purchased a new PC and thought that i would simply be able to move my existing slave drive running on windows XP into the new machine running on vista.

My first problem was that the old hard drive is IDE and the new PC supports SATA so i purchased a converter and hey presto the computer has found and installed the drivers.

The big BUT is that when i try to access the info on the slave drive vista tells me it needs to format the drive and obviously i dont want to loose the data contained on it.

I decided to move the hard drive back to my old machine and move the data using my flash drive but now my old machine is saying it needs to format the drive too.

When i access my disk management the drive is listed but no file system (fat32 or ntfs) is shown and the drive size is indicated as 31.5GB and not 160GB as it should be.

Can anyone help im tearing my hair out :o(

[-pops-]

My first thoughts on this are that the drive has been incorrectly powered down.

Is there any possibility that you disconnected the drive by pulling the plug (either the power or the IDE cable or both) when the computer was running? Doing this can often damage a drive such that it is no longer readable and Windows sees it as an unformatted drive.

If this is the case then I don't think there is anything that can be done to recover the data without a professional (expensive) data recovery operation.

[barryrs]

I thought i was being pretty carefull with it

I hope its not gone tits up as it has nearly 10 years worth of photos and music on it, although the drive is only 12 months old :(

[-pops-]

As I said, that was my first thought.

Hang on a while until someone more expert comes in and see what they say about it. We have some very clever members on the forum but they may be at work and/or overseas.

[barryrs]

I have my fingers crossed pops.

Thanks

[barryrs]

Some good news.

Using Drive Rescue i have managed to retrieve all my photos (one of the most important things) and now when i try and access the drive instead of telling me it needs to be formatted it tells me

E:\ is not accessible

The parameter is incorrect

[-pops-]

Does seem as I thought, then. The drive most likely has had the plug pulled on it.

You have been very fortunate that Drive Rescue succeeded - quite often it only manages part of the job, sometimes none.

As you have managed to get your pictures from it, you should be able to reformat and use the drive afresh.

For the future, why not use the drive for making a backup of your new system?

[barryrs]

All sorted now thanks to a programme called "Windows FAT Data Recovery software"

I ran the free demo version and it found all my files then purchased the full version for £35 so that I could save them onto my new hard drive.

Thanks for the help B)

[LifeLevels]

I also faced this type of situation, not able to access my drive and whenever I try to it says drive is not formatted . do you want to format it ? To overcome from this situation and to recover my data I tried Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software and in the end was satisfied with the result, getting 100% of my data back. Stellar Phoenix not only recovers the data from inaccessible hard drive but also recovers data from formatted hard drive, or data lost occur due to software malfunction, viruses or even sabotage.