Getting a HD working after a format.

Post by **Magnetichead** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 4:09 pm

So this morning I woke up to find guild wars on my doormat. As you could guess I was looking forward to playing it.

But fates a bitch.

I turned the system on and on again and again, whenever I reached the log in screen of XP the system what kick me all the way back to the bios start screen.

Now after trying lots of different things I decided to format my C drive and renstall windows bla bla bla.

Now thats done I plugged my second hd in. Drive G.

Now for some reason the system recognises the drive, but it calls it drive F and doesn't allow me to access it. It doesn't even recognise the size of the drive.

I CANNOT lose the information of this G drive and I have to get it working again. Does anyone know whats up? How do I fix it.

Post by **Mr.Magnetichead** » Tue Aug 16, 2005 10:59 pm

Anyone help?

Post by **-SKID-** » Wed Aug 17, 2005 2:40 am

Is this a Maxtor drive? If so, it sounds like the same problem I had right after 2! of them died. I had to use Stellar Phoenix to recover SOME of the files.

Post by **Mr.Magnetichead** » Wed Aug 17, 2005 7:03 am

Nah it's a samsung.

Post by **4days** » Wed Aug 17, 2005 8:43 am

have you got another machine you can test your g drive in?

Post by **Mr.Magnetichead** » Wed Aug 17, 2005 10:09 am

No afraid not.

Post by **4days** » Wed Aug 17, 2005 11:54 am

wait for someone who knows what the fuck they're talking about to confirm, but you could try:

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

..and check if you could see the drive in that. it boots from a cd or a usb stick, can't write to an ntfs disk but it can read one - so start up the file manager and see if you can mount the drive (right-click, mount).

also, have you run new hardware detection since plugging in the g drive? maybe it needs a specific controller/driver or something.

Post by **raw** » Wed Aug 17, 2005 1:38 pm

Go to the store, pick up a new drive, install the OS, etc..., and then hook up the "G Drive" as a slave, move the data onto the new, good drive, and presto.

I find that when drives are failinig but aren't totally dead, booting off of them puts way too much strain on them and will make it die alot quicker. Follow the above steps and you may have a chance at recovering your data.

Post by **Mr.Magnetichead** » Wed Aug 17, 2005 1:43 pm

The problem drive is less than 6 months old though. I also cannot access it at ALL. I can't see the files, i can't access the files, I can't format the drive. Hell I can't even see the disk size in properties.

Post by **raw** » Wed Aug 17, 2005 1:52 pm

Well, at this point like someone else already said is sending it off for data recovery which is VERY expensive and still does not guarantee data recovery.

I honestly don't think you have the cash to do that so unfortunately it's a complete loss. The only thing you can do now is prevent this from happening again by backing up, or investing in a RAID controller for like $100 and do a RAID 0,1, or 5 for redundancy.

You also have the option to do backups to DVD or CD as well. DVD you can fit quite a bit of data onto and makes a good backup for a fairly cheap price.

Post by **Bacon** » Wed Aug 17, 2005 4:37 pm

Can you view the "g" drive in fdisk?

Post by **Kills On Site** » Wed Aug 17, 2005 8:26 pm

Click that is the download center for Samsung drives. Otherwise raw has said all that I thought of.