Western Digital My Book help

Wedge · Post by **Wedge** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 6:29 pm

This is a friend's drive who says he can't get it to show as a drive letter in Vista. So i told him I would have a look at it on my XP Home edition system, just to be sure the drive is working properly.

The drive is recognized because I get the little balloon tip in system tray showing that the USB mass storage device is being recognized and installed, then i get the "device is ready" message.

But when i go to My Computer and Windows Explorer, the drive is nowhere to be seen.

In the disc management system of administrative tools, the drive is present, but "unallocated". Does this simply mean i need to add the drive as a new partition? I notice that the when i right-click this area (in disc management) the context menu has a "new partition". I am hesitant to click on this because I don't want to mistakenly format the drive because it has my friend's valuable data on it.

Can anybody tell me how I should proceed here? I just want to be sure that i can safely add this drive as a new partition WITHOUT formatting the drive. And if this works, i'm assuming that my friend needs to do something similar in Vista to make it show as a drive letter.

Help would be greatly appreciated.

JimX · Post by **JimX** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 12:36 am

New partition = Format, unfortunately.

The only thing I can suggest is a recovery program, to get the data out, and then format.

It has happened to me on an external drive, but I had backups. I reformatted, two years and still going.

Bluefront · Post by **Bluefront** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 2:12 am

My suggestion is to first plug it into an XP OS computer......get the data off. Then you don't have to worry about losing anything. Vista apparently has problems like this.....and needs it's own format.

qviri · Post by **qviri** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 3:58 am

Wedge wrote:In the disc management system of administrative tools, the drive is present, but "unallocated". Does this simply mean i need to add the drive as a new partition? I notice that the when i right-click this area (in disc management) the context menu has a "new partition". I am hesitant to click on this because I don't want to mistakenly format the drive because it has my friend's valuable data on it.

Can anybody tell me how I should proceed here? I just want to be sure that i can safely add this drive as a new partition WITHOUT formatting the drive. And if this works, i'm assuming that my friend needs to do something similar in Vista to make it show as a drive letter.

You may not - "unallocated" means that, as far as Windows is concerned, there is no partition there right now. No partition means no partition table, no partition table means no information about data.

I think it may be too late now - as far as I know, even other filesystems (ext3, reiser, whatever) should show up as a partition, albeit formatted in a way that Windows cannot read. Windows telling you it's unallocated means that there is no partition on the drive. While the data may still physically be there, the information about where and how it's stored is lost.

Attempting data recovery is probably your best bet as Jim suggested.

Wedge · Post by **Wedge** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 2:26 pm

qviri wrote:Windows telling you it's unallocated means that there is no partition on the drive. While the data may still physically be there, the information about where and how it's stored is lost.

I was afraid that might be the case.

GetDataBack? Any other programs that do this?

Max Slowik · Post by **Max Slowik** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 5:30 pm

I ran into this with a friend's external hard drive, going from Windows 2000 to XP MCE 2005. In the "Computer Management" console, I selected "restore drive" or some weird option I didn't recognize, crossed my fingers and cupped my balls. . .and it worked.

I wish I could tell you what the function was called, but I can't remember. In any case, the partition went from unallocated to just fine in a second.

Wedge · Post by **Wedge** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 6:01 pm

I'm scared to select the "new partition" option. If i do that, I want to see this drive show up as a drive letter. But what I'm afraid will happen is I will see a new option in the same context menu that says "format".

Now, maybe, just maybe I could select "new partition" and it would work as desired. But since this isn't my drive, i can't really take that chance and have a good conscience if it goes wrong.

Right now i am scanning the drive with GetDataBack. I will try to recover all files to a different drive before I experiment with the external drive in question.

Wedge · Post by **Wedge** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 6:05 pm

Maybe a partition table repair software would be helpful? Does anybody know of a such a utility free to download?

Wedge · Post by **Wedge** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 7:31 pm

Okay I just figured something out: this drive is formatted for FAT32.

Is there a tool for copying files from a FAT32 drive to an NTFS drive in Windows XP environment?

Slaugh · Post by **Slaugh** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 10:38 pm

http://www.hiren.info/downloads/data-re ... rd-drive/1

Most of the tools described in this article come with Hiren's Boot CD 9.1. The Ultimate Boot CD has a few helpful tools too.

I used Restorer Pro a few times with success, but this one isn't free.

Bluefront · Post by **Bluefront** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 2:48 am

Wedge.....XP will read data off a fat32 drive, even though it's working off an NTFS formatted drive. Have you tried plugging this drive into a working XP OS computer? Vista computers may have such problems, but XP doesn't, if it's not damaged.

If it still doesn't work, I'd probably take the drive out, and hook it up to a normal IDE connection on an XP machine. Good luck...

qviri · Post by **qviri** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 4:49 am

Bluefront wrote:Wedge.....XP will read data off a fat32 drive, even though it's working off an NTFS formatted drive. Have you tried plugging this drive into a working XP OS computer?

in the original post, Wedge wrote:This is a friend's drive who says he can't get it to show as a drive letter in Vista. So i told him I would have a look at it on my XP Home edition system, just to be sure the drive is working properly.

nick705 · Post by **nick705** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 12:43 pm

Wedge wrote:Okay I just figured something out: this drive is formatted for FAT32.

Is there a tool for copying files from a FAT32 drive to an NTFS drive in Windows XP environment?

You should be able to save the recovered data to an NTFS target drive OK if you're running GetDataBack under XP. There are two versions though, one for recovering from FAT/FAT32 drives and one for NTFS, are you using the right one?

Wedge · Post by **Wedge** » Mon Jul 23, 2007 4:39 pm

I recovered the data using GetDataBack for FAT32.

New problem: everything is recovered except the MS Word documents, and now my friend is asking me where they are. I can't seem to find them (in the copy i made of his drive to my drive). They simply do not appear. All of his pictures and ipod music are present, but no Word documents.

Why might this be the case? What went wrong?

Wedge · Post by **Wedge** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 4:41 pm

I guess there is no way to recover files from the previous FAT32 drive after having formatted it NTFS?

I have all the data that was extracted. It was placed in 8-9 folders, one of which seems to contain nothing but restore point data. Is there any way of using this to recreate the partition? If that is possible, then i could see the MS Word documents. I am willing to create a fresh install of Windows 98 if I have to.

Western Digital My Book help

Western Digital My Book help

Re: Western Digital My Book help

Reading with comprehension is a useful skill