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Question

I need help How can I get my hard drives to be recognized

Sep 27, 2011 11:13PM PDT

My hard drive which had windows on it recently died on me. So I installed it again to a clean drive. But what i can't figure out is how to get my other 2 hard drives to be recognized on this new system. I don't want to lose any of the data.These other 2 hard drive have about 2.5 tb of important stuff that I need

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: how to get hard drives recognized
Sep 27, 2011 11:28PM PDT

Nothing special should be needed. Drives are recognised automatically by Windows if they are recognised by the BIOS, partitioned and formatted. The one possible exception might be that these 2 drives are SATA drives while your restored OS is an old version of Windows XP that doesn't read SATA drives or drives bigger than 127 GB.

As you don't tell:
- what the BIOS says
- what disk management says
- what GPARTED (free download) says
about these disks it's impossible to tell anything sensible about the cause in your case.

Let's hope you have a current backup of those 2.5 TB of important stuff. As we say here: if the owner doesn't make a backup of some data he doesn't find it important.

Kees

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Re
Sep 27, 2011 11:31PM PDT

well it is backed up just on the other hard drives and the bios recognizes it but if i format it or partitioned it then i would lose all the data so thats not exactly what i would like to do. I have 2 hard drives 1tb which is backed up on the 1.5 tb and the 1.5 tb is backed up on the 1 tb i just can't access them because i don't know how.

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Re: drives
Sep 27, 2011 11:36PM PDT

So the BIOS recognizes both drives. That's a good start.

Now tell what Disc Management says about those disks. That's a part of Windows. If you had told your OS I could have told you where to exactly to find it, but now I must ask you to google that yourself.

Kees

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re
Sep 27, 2011 11:53PM PDT

disk management says that there is a disk zero which is the one windows in now installed to. and there is a disk 1 dynamic foreign but doesn't say anything else and a disk 2 dynamic foreign.

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re
Sep 27, 2011 11:54PM PDT

also im using windows 7 home preimeum

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Re: disc management
Sep 28, 2011 12:00AM PDT

Does it say anything about partitions or unallocated space?
Compare with disk zero. What is different?

All I would recommend as a DIY solution is to buy a USB to SATA cable and try the disks as an external disk. If that fails also, for your important files my advice would be to find a good data recovery company, not try the usual DIY recovery software like RECUVA, GETDATABACK or ZER ASSUMPTION RECOVEWY. These might only make it worse.
And what's $500 to recover 2.5 TB of important data? That's only 20 cent a GB. Data that's worth less than 20 cent a GB can hardly be considered important.

Kees

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re
Sep 28, 2011 12:02AM PDT

thank you so much you have been very helpful i will try the usb to sata cable first for sure

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Typo.
Sep 28, 2011 12:13AM PDT

Should be ZERO ASSUMPTION RECOVERY.

Kees