Can't access HDD

UK_Jesus

UK_Jesus

New Member
A friend Gave me their external HDD yesterday to see if i could access it on my comp as it won't on her's. It has lots of very sentimental pix and her dissertation from when she was at uni. I have tried to access it on my pc through the HHD caddy and also tried installing it as a storage drive in my spair desktop, and i have been unable to access.
Does any one have any ideas? there is a chance it may have been droped but not certan. I really dont want to go back empty handed.
Peter
 
If the drive was put into use immediately it would see the factory Fat32 type partition. The software that comes preinstalled on the drive has to be run when swapping to a different version of Windows in a dual boot or moving to another system to see access there.

It's likely the software was knocked out on your friend's machine if the drive is still good. In the bios there's one fast way to see if the drive is being seen by the board. You go into the integrated peripherals or onboard hardware configuration and find the hard drives item there.

When highlighted and pressing the enter key the next screen will have a list of hard drives where you move the default boot device to the top. The usb drive if usb should be in that list. The second method is booting from a live Linux distro like the latest ubuntu "gutsy gibbon" 7.10 or now 8.04 release to see you have access there.

If the drive is seen in the "system" option in one of the drop down menus while booted live you can open it up and also open a second regular hard drive for seeing files copied over. That just may be your option there if the drive wasn't lost from damage or defect.

The first thing I advice people buying external drives running XP or Vista is first reformat the factory Fat partition to see it converted to NTFS. Then you can simply plug it in on any XP or Vista system with no need for the factory installer.
 
Tried a different USB Port???

Plug it straight into the motherboard and see if that works....
 
If it's a usb model? The question now would be the make and model and whether that's a usb, 1394 firewire, eSata, or combination type drive?

A look at the manufacturer's support site is generally the first step when troubleshooting. And the second question would be when was the drive plugged in while the system was turned off or while Windows was running? Generally if while Windows is running the installer's screen should come right up upon detection.
 
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