Help!
I'm throwing myself at the mercy of the vast number of helpful, virile, techy people here.

Earlier today I decided to reformat my six year old hard drive to get rid of the accumilated rubbish that had built up over the years. I backed everything up to my external hard drive (TrekStor Datastation Maxi n.u) and ran the Windows XP CD-ROM I got from Dell with the PC. So far, so good.

I've got it back up and running, updated the service packs etc, but now the computer won't see my external. Well, it's plugged in and showing in the Device Manager, but nothing's coming up on the My Computer dialog box and more worryingly, the external doesn't show up when plugged into the spare laptop. Any sensible suggestions? Please?
(jamesthegill opens new tabs with his scroll wheel, Sun 14 Dec 2008, 15:11, 14 replies, latest was 16 years ago)

Does the partition show up in disk management?
Click Start - Run and type:
compmgmt.msc
then click OK.

When the computer management window open click
Storage - Disk Management

Does the drive show up here? does it recognise the data on there?
(bill, Sun 14 Dec 2008, 15:32, Reply)

The drive shows up
in the bottom section as Disk 1 (with the partitioned internal hard drive as Disk 0) but nothing in the top portion.

More worryingly the status shows as unallocated.
(jamesthegill opens new tabs with his scroll wheel, Sun 14 Dec 2008, 15:36, Reply)

Is there a CD for it or anything like that.
I'm tempted to say it's a driver issue, because I only pretend to know anything about computers.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Sun 14 Dec 2008, 15:45, Reply)

That's what I thought, Mike
But from hunting around for drivers for it it would appear that they're only necessary for Win98 computers, and it's fine to plug and play on XP.
(jamesthegill opens new tabs with his scroll wheel, Sun 14 Dec 2008, 15:48, Reply)

Unallocated isn't good!
Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings but it's not looking too hopeful at the moment.

I haven't had any similar problems for a while but last time I managed to recover most of the data with a program called GetDataBack:
www.runtime.org/

Good Luck!

Edit: Gaz me an email address and I can send you the program
(bill, Sun 14 Dec 2008, 15:48, Reply)

Cheers Bill
Have downloaded the program (did it before your edit) and it's currently nosing it's way through the external. Will keep posted!
(jamesthegill opens new tabs with his scroll wheel, Sun 14 Dec 2008, 16:04, Reply)

One possibility
Perhaps the partition table somehow got screwed up. There are utilities out there that can recognise messed up partition tables. One thing you could try is Beeblebrox partition table editor. I should however warn you, if manually editing the partition-table, be absolutely sure you know what you're doing!!!
( mistaspakkaman and the inedible shifting caterpillars, Sun 14 Dec 2008, 18:58, Reply)

www.recovermyfiles.com/
( idonthaveafunnynickname Drink-Aware? Sure. I'm aware I want another drink., Sun 14 Dec 2008, 20:01, Reply)

there's also the possibility
that, while reformatting your HD, your external was switched on and you accidentally formatted that as well/instead
(bamboozled Can hear you getting fatter, Sun 14 Dec 2008, 21:36, Reply)

Flesh
I think that's what I may have done.
(jamesthegill opens new tabs with his scroll wheel, Sun 14 Dec 2008, 22:07, Reply)

@jamesthegill
Was it a soft-format (erasing the partition-tables / FAT entries or whatever), or a hard format (all the data set to 0)? If it's the latter, then the worst has occurred. If it's the former, some data-recovery software might be able to help.
( mistaspakkaman and the inedible shifting caterpillars, Sun 14 Dec 2008, 22:52, Reply)

Thankfully
It looks like it's just a soft format, and I'm using the program Bill linked to to recover stuff. It's slow going though, given that it takes two hours to scan through, recovers about six files then crashes, prompting the whole process to start again.
(jamesthegill opens new tabs with his scroll wheel, Sun 14 Dec 2008, 23:22, Reply)

Is it the same six files each time?
One thing from my hazy file-recovery memories you could try is to set the program to only recover files with certain types of file-extensions. That might make it easier for the program to work without running out of memory (or perhaps you may have to set it to recover all files at once so it does not have to remember what not to recover - I really can't remember).

Either that or increase the maximum size of your Windows swapfile so it has more virtual memory to work with (although if it's still not enough, that would just end up prolonging the time until it crashes).
( mistaspakkaman and the inedible shifting caterpillars, Sun 14 Dec 2008, 23:43, Reply)

I would just like to say
Thank you to all of you who have offered your help with this. I've recovered everything and got to the point I intended to be at when I first started the activity (having taken a somewhat more stressful and interesting route than planned) and all without spending a penny or losing a thing. None of you had to do anything to help me, yet you still did.

Thank you.
(jamesthegill opens new tabs with his scroll wheel, Tue 16 Dec 2008, 20:31, Reply)