Adding 80GB WD My Book

[Wedge1]

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.

 

[montag451]

You probably need to partition/format the damned thing.

Should be able to do that in Disk management in XP.

 

[Wedge1]

Can't do that. Has data on it. Maybe i'll boot up in Knoppix? Will a Linux system be able to see Windows partitions?

 

[montag451]

If you tell it to.

Don't know the command, but when I did need to know it, it only took me a minute to find it.

 

[Wedge1]

Well i just discovered that this external drive is partitioned FAT32. Is there a tool available for retrieving the files from it (FAT32) to my drive (NTFS)?

 

[Wedge1]

Or perhaps a way to convert the FAT32 to NTFS without destroying the files?

 

[Tarrant64]

You can try to see what drive it's mapped to. Could be it's trying to assign itself to a drive letter that is already taken. I don't know how many drives you have that would cause that issue, but I've seen it happen before.

Especially if you have network drives, say F:, and you put in a USB, and it wants F: too. It's connected, just won't show up. Just assign it to, O: perhaps, and ding! Works.

This may or may not be the solution, but give it a shot.

 

[Evacide]

i know xp has a tool to convert fat32 to ntfs, but not the other way around.
convert c:/ ntfs or something like that

 

[montag451]

XP can read from FAT32 partitions by default.

There is a tool in XP that will convert to NTFS if you want to.....
convert c: /fs:ntfs

 

[Wedge1]

Well I used GetDataBack for FAT32 and it worked - sort of.

I seem to have recovered everything except my friend MS Word documents. Why might all photos and ipod music be recovered, but not MS Word documents?

 

[Wedge1]

Will it be possible to recover any files from the previous FAT32 after formatting it to NTFS? Any possibility at all? My friend is needing some MS Word documents that GetDataBack did not recover.

 

[montag451]

Did he have them encrypted or in an encrypted folder?

 

[Wedge1]

I'm not entirely sure. I scanned the entire drive, sector by sector (that's the way the program seems to work), and it recovered everything it saw. All pics and all music are present and in tact. But no MS Word documents are found in any of the 8 folders that were recovered.

One of the folders contains nothing but subfolders with what appears to be restore point data. Can this data somehow be used to restore the entire partition to a blank partition? Just need an idea here as my friend's wife has really put him in the dog-house because of me.


edit: No, nothing was encrypted