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General discussion

Issue with Vista Home64 and PDF editor

Dec 3, 2010 11:42AM PST

I was looking for a free PDF editor. I found and installed BeCyPDFMetaEdit on my external Seagate Hard Drive. After errors regarding and then telling me that manual unstallation would be required, my Vista64 Home says my external hard drive needs to be formatted. From a DOS window, I can see the infomation on the hard drive, quite a bit of stored information. Windows sees the size and used space, but if I try to explore the drive I get the "Needs to be formatted to use". I am NOT going to do that. I connected the external drive to another system running Vista32 Home and get the same errors. Can anyone tell me how to correct this without formatting my hard drive?

Discussion is locked

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Odds are
Dec 3, 2010 12:05PM PST

Odds are the drive has failed, and there is no method of correcting this. You can either send the thing off to professional recovery services or just accept that everything on there is gone.

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You mention that you can ...
Dec 4, 2010 7:11AM PST
"... see the infomation on the hard drive, quite a bit of stored information" from a DOS window.

Have you tried copying the files to other storage media using that same Command Prompt (DOS Window)?

Have you tried booting one of the many Linux Live CDs to see if the Linux OS can read the drive?

If neither of the above work then you are left with the decision about exactly how valuable the data is because Drive Savers or Ontrack Data Recovery are fairly expensive.

The bright side of this personal disaster is learning the lesson that backed up data is easily replaced but that hard drives are less reliable than optical drives for data backups.
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You'd Think I'd Know Better.
Dec 4, 2010 2:40PM PST

After 18 years as a computer professional, after 18 years of telling my customers to back their data, you'd think I would have a backup. The problem is that this WAS my backup!!!Never had this happen before, ever. Well, SH-T happens, but if any comes up with an answer, I'll be waiting. Thanks

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Did you try Edward's suggestions?
Dec 4, 2010 8:41PM PST

You say you are waiting for answers but how did you get on with Edward's options?

Mark