Unallocated external hard drive

[oscarlets]

Hi All
Eish I have a serious troubling problem,my seagate external hard drive is no longer visible in my computer,only in disk management via control panel and is classified as unallocated,its 500GB hard drive with lots of data in it,including movies and music,most importantly some documents I stored in it for safety,now I can't access it,what can i do to access all the data? was checking on the internet and there are so many programs but I am not sure,for those of you who have experienced the same problem how did you recover your data if you have?

 

[agentrfr]

In disk manager try right click on it and allocate a drive letter. If it asks you if you want to format, cick cancel.

Also try see if it works on another computer.

As an absolute last resort, you can quick format the hard drive to the same file system as before, and you should be able to recover your documents from it. There are a bazillion recovery programs, but I've found http://www.softperfect.com/products/filerecovery/ to work great for less than 1gig of files, even after quick formatting a drive.

(First try http://www.softperfect.com/download/freeware/file_recovery.exe if you know the file names of the documents you are trying to recover, or use http://www.easeus.com/landing/datarecoverywizard.htm to recover an entire directory)

 

[oscarlets]

In disk manager try right click on it and allocate a drive letter. If it asks you if you want to format, cick cancel.

Also try see if it works on another computer.

As an absolute last resort, you can quick format the hard drive to the same file system as before, and you should be able to recover your documents from it. There are a bazillion recovery programs, but I've found http://www.softperfect.com/products/filerecovery/ to work great for less than 1gig of files, even after quick formatting a drive.

(First try http://www.softperfect.com/download/freeware/file_recovery.exe if you know the file names of the documents you are trying to recover, or use http://www.easeus.com/landing/datarecoverywizard.htm to recover an entire directory)

Thank you agentnfr I will try your suggestions.

 

[Aquadyne]

No, don't make ANY changes to the drive until you have recovered your data.

I highly recommend the following software

http://www.restorer-ultimate.com/

I have used it successfully on numerous occasions, even when the drive hasn't been visible or accessible.

I bought this software and it is my primary application / utility for data recovery.

You should also find it available at reputable linux distro download sites, but it is seriously worth having a legitimate paid-for copy.

 

[PsyWulf]

Can bring it to me to take a look too if you are afraid of doing anything serious

 

[noswal]

spinrite... if it is a drive problem