External hard drive suddenly blank

[mrSHEiK124]

Was formatting a friend's computer that had a fubar'd Windows install for him and plugged in my WD 160GB external drive to make backups of anything he might need. Naturally, when I was done, I just yanked the USB cable out because I'm used to MY computer, which doesn't use write caching on removable devices, meaning I can just yank the cable without "Safely removing hardware". Well, after the format was done, we plugged the drive in, and lo and behold, the entire 160GB lists as "unallocated" in Disk Management and does not show up as a drive in My Computer. My question is, how can I get the files back? He was able to replace his music and pictures from his own periodic backups (although they were 2 or 3 days old, boo-hoo) but now I've lost a couple of family pictures that only exist on said drive. How can I get them back?

 

[mrSHEiK124]

Bump

 

[statikuz]

I had this identical problem, I yanked my external HDD out too many times without using the eject thingy. I used a program called Active@ Undelete and was able to get most of it back. I don't remember the exact process so this won't be too helpful but I think I used PartitionMagic to get it to at least recognize the drive somehow, CHKDSKed a few times and then used Undelete.

 

[mrSHEiK124]

Originally posted by: statikuz
I had this identical problem, I yanked my external HDD out too many times without using the eject thingy. I used a program called Active@ Undelete and was able to get most of it back. I don't remember the exact process so this won't be too helpful but I think I used PartitionMagic to get it to at least recognize the drive somehow, CHKDSKed a few times and then used Undelete.

Thanks, I'll try that, I think I still have Partition Magic. Anyone else have tips or pointers to get everything back in case this method fails?

 

[statikuz]

I think I may have done a quick format on the drive just to get Windows to recognize it again so I could use PartitionMagic and CHKDSK but I'm not sure... if you can, try to avoid that... even though formatting doesn't wipe out your drive, it might screw up the few things you want to save. That Undelete worked pretty well though and it was like $20 or $30.

 

[mrSHEiK124]

PartitionMagic ended up being all I needed, I just undeleted the partition and everything came back.

 

[statikuz]

Awesome, I know that "oh ******" feeling when all of a sudden there's nothing on your drive.

 

[ZYFER]

I had an external drive do this before too, even though I did everything right. Using a data recovery program worked just fine, took me almost no time at all to recover, just a minor corruption of the partition.

 

[Jeff7]

I've given up on that Safely Remove Hardware thing with my external hard drive because it always says that the drive is still in use. It's not copying anything, nor am I browsing the drive, but it always tells me that its still busy and can't be stopped. I just unplug it too, and it still hasn't gone bad on me.
I've got R-Studio handy in case it does.