Hard Disk Data Recovery Software After Format
External Hard Drive recognized but not appearing in “My Computer”?
I have an external hard drive which of recent is not accessible.I tried to use some data recovery software to retrieve critical information from the drive but failed.I want to format it but have the intention of recovering my data later on but even this has failed.
The problem that I am having, is that when I plug in the drive, Windows XP SP2 recognizes that an external hard disk is plugged in, it is visible in disk management as: Disk 1,unknown,not initialized and it shows far less disk size but it does not appear in “MY Computer”. The device manager lists the drive, and does not report any problems. I need some way to access the drive and format it, but Windows isn’t allowing me to see the drive to perform the task. I even tried to go under disk management but i could not see the formating option after right clicking.
The device also has no drive letter and i tried using on several windows xp computers but still failed.
Your assistance is welcome.Thanks
If you have the intentions of recovering data, why format it? If you format it, you -may- still be able to get the data, but most likely not without paying real money for software or someone else to do it. If you format it and then use it, you can kiss the data goodbye.
If your harddrive has a bad controller or other hardware that failed somehow (which is somewhat indicative of having to try to recover data from it and it not working properly) you’re out of luck anyway. I would say your only shot at this point is booting to that harddrive and formatting it with the windows installation cd.
If you’re knowledge-able with computers, I would suggest using the command prompt to access it and doing a format /Q. More info can be found on this at the microsoft website under command prompt commands; I’m not going to say anymore because you could easily wipe something you don’t want to.
Q&A, hard drive formatting & what to do with your computer when disposing if it.