Can't see the data on my external hard drive

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digital81

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I've just connected an external hard drive to my pc and although it finds it in computer management, it won't in explorer. The drive in the external case was the slave drive in my old computer and has all my documents on it which i need to recover.

Can anyone help me get windows to read the data on the drive.
 
digital81 said:
I've just connected an external hard drive to my pc and although it finds it in computer management, it won't in explorer. The drive in the external case was the slave drive in my old computer and has all my documents on it which i need to recover.

Can anyone help me get windows to read the data on the drive.
Click to expand...
Have you tried switching it from slave to master? I had a really fussy enclosure that balked at that.
 
feo said:
Is the drive initialised in Computer Management?
Click to expand...

Not sure what you mean by initialised. It is displayed but i can't do anything with it.

I'll try switching it to to slave and post back.
 
No luck with slave settings. Still showing in computer management. The only option under the right click menu is delete partition.
 
What OS did the old computer run? And the new one?
 
digital81 said:
No luck with slave settings. Still showing in computer management. The only option under the right click menu is delete partition.
Click to expand...

If it only shows delete partition, it sounds as if your current OS doesn't understand the partition on the external. As per bwana's post, what OS versions are involved.

Also, as a rule the enclosures are looking for "master" drives, but I am sure there will be some exceptions.
 
Both systems are XP though the old one may have only been original windows and the new one has service pack 2 installed.

Also the drive is showing as blank (100% free space).
 
digital81 said:
Both systems are XP though the old one may have only been original windows and the new one has service pack 2 installed.

Also the drive is showing as blank (100% free space).
Click to expand...

The XP vs XP2 shouldn't make a difference. The fact that you are seeing 100% free space, means that the new machine is not recognising the partition on the external. For instance, my WinXP machine sees a MAC OS partition on the external as free space.

quite a little issue you are sitting with there, as the two XPs shouldn't have any problem with the partitions
 
I'm not sure if the drive was partitioned at all when i was using it before. could this make a difference?
 
you HAVE to partition a drive to use it (in most circumstances anyway)
 
If you were using it before, it will have a partition on it (unless it got deleted somehow :eek:)

Starting to sound like a partition table problem, read damaged.
Is the drive in the external case set to slave or master now?
Also, what external chassis are you using, and what HDD is it?
 
My guess would be that it needs to be formatted to the same file system as your OS. Did you run your old systems OS on a FAT32 or NTFS HD? And the new one?

Edit: actually that shouldn't be a problem. I just connected an NTFS external to an old FAT32 computer and it works. Perhaps windows hasn't assigned it a drive letter yet which you need to do manually.
 
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Right click on "My Computer", click on "Manage", goto "Disk Management". See if you can see your drive listed there. If you can, assign it a different drive letter.

See if that helps.
 
The drive is set to master. The chassis is from maplin electronics (model S73 0BS) in the UK. The instructions say that it reads slave and master.
 
Highflyer_GP said:
My guess would be that it needs to be formatted to the same file system as your OS. Did you run your old systems OS on a FAT32 or NTFS HD? And the new one?
Click to expand...

That should only be the case if the new system is FAT32 and the external is NTFS (but also not necessarily).
 
Can't assign it a different letter. I've tried the master drive from the old system and that one worked fine, i'm pretty sure they're both NTFS, as is my new OS.
 
LandyMan said:
That should only be the case if the new system is FAT32 and the external is NTFS (but also not necessarily).
Click to expand...

Actually it shouldn't be a problem at all, I edited the post. Just tested an NTFS external on an old FAT32 system and it works. My guess would be that windows hasn't assigned the drive a letter which he needs to do manually.
 
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If you have any network drives, perhaps disable them? I found problems with usb drives sometimes appearing in windows explorer if I had mapped network drives. Going into Disk management and changing drive letters usually resolved the problem.
 
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