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General discussion

Help Needed - Salvaging my HDD using a caddy & laptop

Apr 11, 2007 4:32AM PDT

Im having problems.

Ive recently began using a new laptop (Fujitsu Siemens Amilo L7310GW), the operating system is XP home (SP2), and Im trying to access the data from my old Desktop PC hard-drive.

The old HDD is an ExcelStor 60Gb, with a lot of personal files I really am loathe to lose. I purchased a 3.5 HDD Caddy (InSixt) and inserted the drive, all seems well, but the laptop will not recognise/indicate for access in 'My Computer'. I have been into the Disk Management settings, it shows the disk as there, healthy, but hasn't attributed a Drive letter to it.

On right-clicking, the only option available is to 'Delete Partition', (which would delete the data I wish to keep), all other options on right-click are grey out/unavailable options.

Now, when the drive was in my old PC, it had a partition set in

(30Gb for system software etc/30Gb for personal files/mp3/pictures etc), and I suspect this may be part of the reason I cant access the drive. All drivers for the HDD are up-to-date and I have tried the drive in caddy on my neighbours pc, with exactly the same results.

Would anybody out there in Cyberia have any helpful information for me, it would be most appreciated. I have visited a plethora of other forums/help threads and as yet havent found a satisfactory solution.

I would be deeply grateful if somebody could offer assistance.

Hi, by the way, bit heavy for a 1st post but Im getting a tad dismayed by what (I think) should be quite straghtforward! Thanks in advance, B.

Discussion is locked

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Since no drive letter, proceed with care.
Apr 11, 2007 6:08AM PDT

There should have been NO DRIVERS installed. If you did you could have mucked up the works. Unplug the drive, eject those drivers and try one more time. XP SP2 supports such things without added drivers.

-> Next up? Zero Assumption Recovery (ZAR), GETDATABACK and other titles. These have free demos to see what they can get back.

Bob

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To clarify about drivers
Apr 11, 2007 7:31AM PDT

as it is a 'plug n play' compliant device, it picked up the 'USB Mass Storage Device', gives me a 'safe to remove' option etc, the 'drivers' i refer to were auto-installed by xp, without the use of a driver disk, (which i put in and forced the 'update driver' to look there, only to be informed best possible driver already installed).

Thanks for your reply & the software nods Bob. I feared it may come down to FDisk-ing the drive then seeing what I could recover Sad

Really, mostly I wanted some photos of a now deceased family member, and salvaging this drive without the 'wipe-drive-then-cross-fingers' was a small hope.

PS. Anybody have any figures re: success rates with various recovery software?

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Fairly good but only...
Apr 11, 2007 7:47AM PDT

If we haven't tried too much with chkdsk etc.

I forgot to note the "other" issue. Sometimes I find the drive and case plugged into a non-USB 2.0 connection. Even if the case writes USB 1.1 support I've found it not to be true.

OTHER titles like CD/DVD emulators and USB flash drives can interfere but since these are not noted (yet) I can only guess.

Bob

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Why don't you
Apr 12, 2007 11:54AM PDT

install the drive as a slave in another desktop PC. Should be able to then access it.

Another way, if I read your post right, is since you have 2 partitions on it, OS and data, you should be able to delete the OS primary partition without impacting the second partition.

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thanks for the help
Apr 12, 2007 8:28PM PDT

i'll give it a try my friend, sounds like a feasible option, when it asked me to 'delete partition' i wasn't sure if it was the boot/os partition or the self-created one, fingers x'ed & thanks again!