[Richard King]

I have an external USB hard drive attached to the computer. It has been working fine for a couple of years, until a couple of days ago. I thought it might be the external enclosure so I got a new one with the same results. The computer sees the drive but doesn't assign a letter to the drive so I can't access anything on the drive. See the pix below. "My computer" doesn't show the drive. "Device Manager" shows it as the MDT drive. The first "Device Properties" pic shows the drive and all properties except a drive letter. The second "Device Properties" shows the same properties for the "C" drive. Any suggestions?

 

[LarryFlowers]

I have an external USB hard drive attached to the computer. It has been working fine for a couple of years, until a couple of days ago. I thought it might be the external enclosure so I got a new one with the same results. The computer sees the drive but doesn't assign a letter to the drive so I can't access anything on the drive. See the pix below. "My computer" doesn't show the drive. "Device Manager" shows it as the MDT drive. The first "Device Properties" pic shows the drive and all properties except a drive letter. The second "Device Properties" shows the same properties for the "C" drive. Any suggestions?

Do you have another PC to try it on... and what is the manufacturer of the Hard Drive?

 

[Richard King]

Forgot to mention, I tried it on the laptop with the same results. I may have a dead drive. There's a lot of good stuff on it that I would like to get off though.

 

[deltafowler]

Check the drive's properties in Disk Management and see if a drive letter assigned there.
Run a diagnostic utility on it.
You can get one from the hardware manufacturer. Seagate, Maxtor, etc.

 

[TBoneit]

Easy way to get to disk management is to right click on My Computer then choose manage, Then look on the left for Disk Management. On the computer I'm sitting at you'll notice that drive 0 has two partitions with no drive letters. With Dell the smaller one is a diagnostic partition and the larger one is a recovery partition. So for this computer that is normal. If you see a disc 1 or 2 for example with no drive letter that may be your external drive. If you see foreign drive that could be it too.
"
Go to www.ontrack.com at this page http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/data-recovery-downloads/ and download the "EasyRecovery DataRecovery - Trial Edition" that will tell you if all is lost or is recoverable. It will even recover one file "Allows you to view software functionality and recover a single file for free"

I suggest it as a test to see if all is lost as it isn't cheap but the trial will work and the paid version works well.

Good Luck

 

[Richard King]

Thanks for the help. EasyRecovery is scanning the drive. It has found some files, but just started. I have over 5,000 songs on that drive. It's found 28 files in 5 minutes and still has 2.5 hours to go.

OnTrack is the company that I bought my very first PC system from. The the time they were doing data recovery and building custom systems. I bought a 186 system from them at the time. They are (were?) based about 3 miles from where I used to live. I used them years ago to recover a bunch of work data from a dead 40M hard drive. It cost several hundred dollars to do that at the time. Of course, I had to take the drive in to them.

After 11 minutes it's still at 28 files in 15 directories. Not looking good.

 

[Richard King]

By the way, most of the files are backed up on a second drive, but there are probably a couple hundred songs that are not.

 

[Richard King]

The program found 220 recoverable files, none of which were of any value to me.

 

[Richard King]

I'm trying their "Pro" level program. It's been running for 44 minutes so far and has 4 HOURS left. So far it has found 437,000 files. I have no idea if they are recoverable. :lol:

 

[Richard King]

Still another 45 minutes to go and over 5,000,000 files found. I think something is out of whack here.

 

[dmurphy]

What brand of external HD do you have?

Recent (last 2-3 years or so) LaCie hard disks have a pretty notoriously wonky power supply ... LaCie will replace that free of charge.

I've had 3 external disks appear to drop dead in the last 2 months ... new supplies and we're back in business!

 

[Richard King]

I switched it to a new enclosure with no change. The old enclosure took forever to get into to install the drive and was even worse trying to get it out, so it has now become one with the landfill.

 

[Richard King]

I haven't had time to mess with the hard drive since the previous post, but I did come across this http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html which I am going to try over the weekend (maybe). Even if I don't get to it this weekend, it's an interesting read.

 

[phrelin]

I haven't had time to mess with the hard drive since the previous post, but I did come across this http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html which I am going to try over the weekend (maybe). Even if I don't get to it this weekend, it's an interesting read.

Let us know how it worked. I froze an otherwise dead drive and was able to get a couple of critical files off it. It's weird and I had to be fast with the copy instruction and I wasn't running Vista then - I booted in safe mode with a command prompt and used DOS commands to copy the three files. That would be hard with a larger number of files buried on a drive with a very large number of files.

Good luck!

 

[MikeW]

I had the same issue with my USB drive. To compound the issue, I had just moved ALL of my data files off of my main PC onto the USB drive and formatted the hard drive. The USB drive WAS my backup and had the main data copied onto it as well. I used this program and had 100% recovery of the data. I bought the "cheap" version for $70.

http://www.easeus.com/

 

[curt8403]

Richard, did you ever get your external (USB) drive to work? I had the same problem with a Maxtor USB drive (MP3 Player) and discovered that IF i pressed the menu button on the drive, it suddenly appeared.

 

[Richard King]

That's the one that currently resides in my freezer (pictures later). The only button on the enclosure is a power button. I hope to have time later today or tomorrow to test the frozen drive theory.

 

[dmurphy]

The best external drive cases I've ever used are from Other World Computing.

www.macsales.com

I have several of both the Mercury on-the-go portable and the Mercury Elite Pro series.

Good stuff, and awesome technical support.

OWC has a "garage sale" going on this weekend - clearance on open-box items and such.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/garage_sale

I have no affiliation with these guys, just a happy customer

 

[Richard King]

Freezing didn't work.