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Data recovery on work computer

A

AgentCipher

Member
Hey all,

As the resident guy in my research lab who knows ANYTHING about computers, I was tasked today with recovering research data from a drive that crashed.

I know, in before "lol backup."

Anyways, I extracted the drive from the tower and plugged it into an external USB enclosure, and the drive is unrecognized by Windows. Under Device Manager it recognizes the enclosure, and recognizes that there's probably a drive in there, but it can't do anything with it. Since the drive isn't installed, chkdsk won't work, and Disc Manager can't initialize the drive.

I can't tell at this point if it's a logical or hardware error, as I don't have the necessary equipment to take this thing apart safely. I'm afraid of using data recovery software, as the original file names are incredibly important (tells us what experiment we ran at what time).

Basically, any thoughts / help would be greatly appreciated. I searched the forum but didn't find anything immediately relevant.

Thanks!
 
You do not need professional data recovery if the hard drive is still in good condition. If you just need Windows to recognize the hard drive in an external hard drive enclosure. Simply, just follow the steps below.

Right click "My Computer". Click Manage. Go to "Storage/Disk Management" and check to see if the hard drive volume is "allocated" and recognized by the computer. If it is "unallocated", then install the hard drive by clicking the hard drive volume, create a "new simple volume", and assign it a drive letter, etc. Once, you get to the "format" section. Just choose "Do not format this volume". The installation process should be simple.

I have had to do this for every new hard drive I installed in my external hard drive enclosure for it to be recognized by Windows.

Here is a FAQ page with the installation steps and photos. I hope this helps.
http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Faq.aspx?ID=1079
 
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Thanks all. Luckily we're on a university campus, so we may have an on-site IT department capable of this.

I appreciate your input!
 
Well, in the "Boy Do I Feel Stupid" moment of the day, it turns out that the IT department figured out the problem.

The jumper was set to Slave instead of Master.

So, apparently someone decided to open the case and fiddle with the jumper. Naturally, when I opened the case, I figured that the computer that was working just last week wouldn't have had its jumper settings changed for no apparent reason.

Just a little anecdote of how "no matter how unlikely it may seem, someone is bound to do something stupid and break the computer."

Hope you all got a chuckle out of my schadenfreude! /headdesk
 
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