Any way to get my data back?

[Trevor]

My Maxtor EHD Personal Storage 3200 is not given a drive letter and I can't
access it, though it is shown as Disk 1 in Drive Management. (right clicking
to allocate a drive letter not an option, it's not there).

It worked finer a couple of weeks ago on an XP machine in England (I'm in
France). Then I got a new Vistas PC and it wouldn't work with that, but
would still work with the XP Pro machine. Now I'm here it doesn't work in
either a desktop or laptop both running XP Home edition.

I started to run Seagates File Recovery programme. After 24 hours it had
only scanned 20%. It's unlikely to go for 5 days without needing booting as
I need it for work.

Disk Management is showing Disk 1 unknown 279.47 Gb Not initialised.
Unallocated.

How can I get to my data.?

 

[Paul]

My Maxtor EHD Personal Storage 3200 is not given a drive letter and I can't
access it, though it is shown as Disk 1 in Drive Management. (right clicking
to allocate a drive letter not an option, it's not there).

It worked finer a couple of weeks ago on an XP machine in England (I'm in
France). Then I got a new Vistas PC and it wouldn't work with that, but
would still work with the XP Pro machine. Now I'm here it doesn't work in
either a desktop or laptop both running XP Home edition.

I started to run Seagates File Recovery programme. After 24 hours it had
only scanned 20%. It's unlikely to go for 5 days without needing booting as
I need it for work.

Disk Management is showing Disk 1 unknown 279.47 Gb Not initialised.
Unallocated.

How can I get to my data.?

"Wasbit" created a nice list of programs here.
http://groups.google.ca/group/alt.c...read/thread/fea9dcd9dc1d1750/19b83c40a326f9b0

Programs will have various approaches to recovery. The safest method would be
one that attempts to copy content from the broken disk, to a new disk. An
alternate method, is to try to repair the structure of the broken disk, and
that can have side effects if it fails (such as rendering easy recovery
with some other tool, impossible).

That being said, you could try something like this.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

If you make a sector by sector copy of the disk, to a new disk,
that can serve as a backup copy. So if the original disk fails
in the process of recovery, you have an alternative. (The reason
I mention making a backup copy, before using something like the
approach in TestDisk, is because I've had a case years ago,
where a recovery program made further recovery impossible.)

Paul