Tera drive no longer shows up in my computer

[Krist]

I have a Tera-drive that just stopped working. It is not viewable in My Computer. I recently tried installing Linux onto an internal 30GB hard drive. I noticed about 15 seconds into the format process that the drive being formatted was 900+ GB in size, so I aborted the install.

When I go into Computer Mangement (Via Right click "My computer"-->Manage-->Disk Managment) I can see my drive, I can also see a "USB Mass Storage Device" in Device Manager":
http://forums.xkcd.com/download/file.php?id=24337&mode=view


The status lights on my drive are normal, and it is making it's normal set of sounds for functioning normally. I have not dropped recently, and all the cables are plugged in.

I am running Windows XP currently, but have tried booting into multiple distros of linux, and my drive doesn't show up there, either.

I have an un-delete program in windows that I'm fairly certain can recover the data, but first I need to be able to view it in My Computer

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[Devilpapaya]

The drive probably isn't showing up because there are no readable partitions. From the disk management window there you should be able to redo the partitions, or at least format them to a readable filesystem. They should then show up and you can use your recovery program (I like recuva) to find the files.

If the windows API allowed direct access to hardware you wouldn't need to reformat the drive before you could see it and run the undelete program on it, but it doesn't, so here we are.

Also, when you reformat the partition(s) to NTFS (or whatever) windows is going to warn you that it will erase all data, but it doesn't really. All it does is re-write a blank master file-table which makes the partition appear blank, but the recovery program will still be able to find 99% of the files, assuming they weren't overwritten by something else prior.

 

[Krist]

I'm a little iffy on reformatting my drive, but if no one else replies soon, I'll give that a go.

Thanks.

 

[Devilpapaya]

I'm a little iffy on reformatting my drive, but if no one else replies soon, I'll give that a go.

Thanks.

Right on, like I said though reformatting doesn't erase the data on the drive (unless you instruct it to do a secure overwrite). All it does is write a blank File table for the partition, making it appear blank to the OS. Any un-delete program worth it's salt will still be able to see the previous files.

This is how people pull credit card, security, etc. info from HDDs people throw away.

Alternatively you'd need to find a DOS (or some other OS that allows direct HW access) that provides file recovery support. I don't know any, but you could look.

 

[Krist]

So, just to be sure, should I click format, or quick format?

 

[Devilpapaya]

So, just to be sure, should I click format, or quick format?

Quick format, it shouldn't matter, and I've never seen a difference between thee two.

 

[Krist]

Neither have I, but then I thought it best to ask, just in case. Thank you for all your help.

 

[Devilpapaya]

Neither have I, but then I thought it best to ask, just in case. Thank you for all your help.

yep, no problem. Best of luck with the recovery.

 

[RebateMonger]

I think it's an unnecessary risk to reformat the disk. Get some data recovery software, run it on a working computer, and attach the disk to that computer. The data recovery software will scan the disk and create an index of readable files.

 

[Krist]

Can you recommend some good free data recovery software that would work in this scenario? I'd love to avoid re-formatting my drive if I can.