tremmor

I installed a wd 160 a few years ago on a computer for backup purposes. my wife also uses another partition that was added to it. the drive d: is working but cant access the e: partition. from windows or dos it says needs to be formatted. My question is what other options are available or software i might be able to use for the recovery?

PC eye

If the drive's icon is missing in MyComputer then try the uninstall option when right clicking on the drive in the device manager to uninstall and then restart the system to see if a fresh detection is all that is needed. If drive information was corrupted due to the drive becoming heavily fragmented after that amount of time defragging might help a little while data recovery options would be the thought there.

For copying files from a hard to access partition or drive there's one old article about one Linux live for cd distro Knoppix that can perform that. But you won't see the speed like you would in Windows for copy + paste. http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/

That's the easy way once you get somewhat familiar with Knoppix or one of the other live for cd-r type distros like ubuntu. For the Windows only user then you look at programs like Active Undelete or another file recovery program. Once you are able to retrieve all files from the effected drive you will probably end up repartitioning and reformatting to see new fresh partitions on it.

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tremmor

Ok......thanks.
i'll take a look at what ya said and let ya know.
thanks again

SirKenin

You'll quickly figure out that he has no idea what he's talking about. lol

So if you divided the drive into two partitions, the main partition shows up and the second partition doesn't, that means that the drive MFT (Master File Table) is damaged/corrupted/whatever.

Western Digitals are very prone to corrupting the MFT. There are three things you can count on in life. Death, taxes and fubared Western Digital Caviars.

You can try running a disk repair on it first. Get your Windows CD, boot into the setup, and at the first screen select "R" for recovery console. Then you can select your d and e drives separately and do a check/repair on them.

More information is here if you need to delve into it further:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/121517

PC eye

A useless link seen there since there is no boot sector on the second drive used for storage and not the OS.

For active partition recovery there are retail programs designed just for that as well as recovering files that were accidentally deleted. Active has programs just for this seen at http://www.partition-recovery.com/

__________________
Turning the Tongue into a Device Controller
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Sma...ory?id=5647175

Is EBay going out of the Auction Business?
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=5626840&page=1