Maximum PC

On this other forum I visit there is this user who has an external Western Digital 2TB hard drive. For some reason unknown to him or us the drive started showing up in Windows as unallocated. He's trying to recover the files he had on the drive. Is there any software solution that can access those files as is or does he have to repartition the disk before he can work with it?

You might give this program a try...it is free:

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Do not do anything to the drive until you recover the files.

It sounds like the drive may be dieing, I would run the hard drives diagnostic on it to see if it is healthy or on the way to the dump. You can get the diagnostic software from the hard drives site.

Nasty

will it be able to recover the files when there is no partition?

It is free try it!

Nasty

I think you should try http://datarecoveryconcepts.com/ this will definitely help in recover lost files.

http://www.eggxpert.com/forums/permalin ... spx#676239

Recuva won't work because there is no file structure. Your friend will have to recover the partition info. He also needs to figure out or come clean on why his HDD is now unallocated.

I came to this thread during a search for a solution to my "Unallocated" HDD. I never formatted it, i just did some basic back up of my data before putting in my new HDD. This Unallocated HDD is my second drive and it was working fine. I put in my new drive installed win 7 and i when to start transfer of my data back and then the window suddenly shut off, so i went back into mycomputer and the drive was not there.. I went into computer MGMT and there is was! "Unallocated" data recovery wont work because there is nothing deleted and well its not there... It shows in BIOS and in Computer MGMT.. anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you

Regards
Dillinger

Format the drive first then move data to it.

Nasty

no I want the data from it...I had backed up data to it from my old C drive and now i cant read it Unallocated..formatting it would destroy the data..and i know there is software to undelete that but if there is a solution other than that. then id rather try it.

thank you

Ok, I misunderstood you. You can try using this program to recover the data on the disk, its free:

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Nasty

awesome dude I'll try it tell you if it worked..I appreciate your help.

thanks but you have to pay for it..

eh...I'd just go on the assumption that the drive isn't damaged and break out gpart and try to repair the partition table first...

If that works, then there's no need for file recovery as your files should just be there at that point.

http://www.mohdshakir.net/2008/01/03/re ... e-cd-gpart

thank you but I went ahead and did the format so I could get the drive readable and am now getting it scanned

Also recuva is freeware.. the pro edition that was 24 some odd dollars...

http://www.filehippo.com/download_recuva so it is free... however i think it may be best to try furball's suggestion as i have not had great success with recovering data like this... Last few times i tried it it failed, would only find a few things because the partition tables were off.. using 4 different tools and everything... recently i theorized that because i was not using the tool that originally formatted it at factory, i would always be off and the data would technically be nothing but a jumble of random data... header files could not be read right and no data could be recovered correctly through standard methods... This is why i think it may be best that a repair is done first... there is no 100% guarantee that the recovery will be successful... however if a repair succeeds... all your data will be back... not just parts

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