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External HD problem...this one is interesting...


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#1
smkeddy

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I have an internal Western Digital 80 GB HD inside of an Adaptec 3.5" USB 2.0 case. It has worked well for almost a year. When I reformatted my computer last week, I left the external HD plugged in and when it prompted me which parition I wanted Windows installed on (in that DOS-like Windows installation program after startup), I deleted both partitions (not thinking the second was my external) with no actual formatting yet. (it appeared as if the "labels" for the drives had been erased, but no physical formatting had yet occured). I then ran out of battery, plugged my power in and restarted, this time with the external unplugged. I got to the format screen again, this time with only my internal drive listed and went along with the formatting that took awhile. (Didnt go through this before with either drives).

Now, when I plug my external in, Windows recognizes it, and it appears in the Device Manager as working properly, but the drive is NOT there in My Computer...

any suggestions??? I, as well as a few of my savvy friends, are stumped.

Thanks a lot for any and all help!

Scott Keddy
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#2
Kemasa

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If you deleted the partition, then it will not show up under "My Computer" as there is nothing to show. You need to recreate the partiition, but without creating the filesystem on it and you need to use the same partition type as before.

I am not sure if you can do it with Windoze as it wants to recreate the filesystem. The older fdisk program allows it.

What I would suggest is to download and create a Knoppix Live CD, then boot the CD and use either fdisk or qtparted to create the partition. I would suspect that the partition type was " 7 HPFS/NTFS" since you use XP, but it could be something else. After that, you should be able to see the partition under Windoze.
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#3
smkeddy

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Yeah, that was it, I deleted the parition. I just tried to use this repartition software and it did a quick format of my external!!! Since it was a quick format and I havent written anything to it yet, Im assuming no data has been lost. Any way to recover it??
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#4
Kemasa

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I am not sure as I don't know what the quick format does exactly. I suspect there are programs which will recover the data, but I don't know of any which are free.
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