Help restoring MBR/partition on external HDD - please?

M

mohammedm

Well-Known Member
Joined
Aug 11, 2003
Messages
308
Reaction score
1
Location
Gold Coast, Australia.
I have a Siemens StorageBird XL 100GB external hard drive (with all my info on it). This was connected via USB to my laptop. I was in the process of installing a fresh copy of WinXP from a recovery disk and reached the setup point where I was asked where I wanted to install Windows. At this stage, I selected the external hard drive, and "accidentally" deleted the partition. On realising my mistake, I cancelled the Windows setup, without going on to format the external hard drive and installing Windows.

Now, I cannot access my externall hard drive. When I plug it into Windows, I get an error - unrecognised device connected to USB port. I also cannot see the drive in Windows Explorer.

I suspect that I have destroyed the FAT table or the MBR on this drive.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can repair this drive and get my info back?
 
right click on my computer...go to "manage", click on "disk management" see if you can see your drive there, and format it through there.

Your MBR master boot record is for booting, and should have nothing to do with your external drive. Though if you are getting an unrecongnised device in when you plugin your USB harddrive, I would suspect something dodge up with the drivers.
 
I can see that disk under DISK MANAGEMENT.
It is however, unpartitioned - I suppose this is why I cannot access it.

I do not want to format and create a new partition at this stage - I want to try and access the file structure and get my info back first.

Is there any way to restore a deleted partition, or does anyone have any other suggestions?
 
what bdt said. There are a variety of tools to recover deleted partitions.
 
Thanks guys

There is no quick way of doing this manually. You need to have a third party program.

I tried GetDataBack. This works well and will allow you to copy your files from the damaged partition to another drive. I didn't feel like scanning and copying 250GB.

I then found a program called Active Partition Recovery (version 5). This was excellent. It scanned the drive, found the damaged FAT table and MBR. I then clicked RECOVER and within 5 seconds it sorted the drive out and I am now able to access the drive without problems.

Thanks for the speedy responses.
 
bdt said:
There are any number of 'doze-based data recovery apps out there, Runtime Software's GetDataBack is the one I usually use. The rest of the gang will likely tell you of others.
Click to expand...

Anybody have a nzb site or any other site where I can get the full version of Data Recovery??
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X