Hard Drive encloser died how to recover data

[superdappa]

Hello All
I have a western digital drive that the enclosure died and now i only have the drive i removed it fromt he enclouser and connected it to my pc with a sata cable and power. now the dirve shows up in windows 7 and says that the drive needs to be initialized either MBR *( Master Boot Record) or GPT ( GUID Partition Table) now here is my problem im not sure if i initialize it if im going to lose the 700 GB of data on the drive or i will be able to see this? this is my problem i need help with this please anyone have any ideas or if you know any programs that can recover this data?

Thanks

 

[floppybootstomp]

Go to the search box bottom left and type in 'disk management'. This brings up a window where you can perform operations on your hard disks, your external disk should show.

Somewhere in there you can initialise the disk. From memory I think you right click on the disk's box to the left and from the menu displayed you can select 'initialise'.

To the best of my knowledge this won't destroy data on the disk, I'm fairly sure only formatting can do that, but it will enable you to explore the disk in 'Computer' and let you transfer data from it.

 

[superdappa]

thanks floppy i will try this, as the drive shows that it there with no drive letter but ask me to initialize

 

[superdappa]

when i selected the mbr and inialize it says device is not ready.

 

[superdappa]

ok so now i have got the drive to initialize but now it shows that the drive is unallocated i have the following options to make this drive a new simple volume and allocate this drive space to the max, but im worried the data will be lost if i do this.

 

[Silverhazesurfer]

If the machine is asking you to create a volume, then that means it is formatted with something other than FAT or NTFS. If you do that, there is a chance that the data could be damaged.

What was the failure that you experienced? It may be related to why Windows wants to initialize and create volumes on this disk. To my knowledge, you are only asked to initialize a brand new disk. This allows Windows to recognize that you want to use the disk and that it can be managed by Windows.

Details of the failure may point to why you are seeing this message.

 

[superdappa]

Well this drive according to the person was in a enclosure and then the enclosure went bad. so he removed it from the enclosure and we thought it could have been just plugged back into another computer via sata connections and we would be able to see the data but there was no such luck with that. so now i can see that the drive is plugged in but i cannot assign drive letters nor access it due to that fact that it is not allocated. not only that i dont want to lose the data on the drive.

 

[floppybootstomp]

You could try booting from a Live Linux Distro Disk (Linux Mint V11 'Katya' is as good as any) and see if you can read the disk from there.

You'll need to download the Linux ISO and burn it to CD/DVD and boot from it but once running the OS runs from computer memory, there's no permanent installation.

 

[superdappa]

ok thanks i will be abel to move the data off the drive though correct, do you have any good links for this OS?

 

[Silverhazesurfer]

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

I would try this. You can burn it to a CD and live boot the system. It will be as if you installed the OS and should allow you do what you need.

 

[superdappa]

thanks guys for the help i got it fixed, i had to use a 3rd party software that allowed me to allocate the partition and get the data. thanks all.

 

[Silverhazesurfer]

What software was it? Curiosity gets me now.

 

[superdappa]

thanks guys fixed the problem by using a 3rd party software.

 

[floppybootstomp]

thanks guys fixed the problem by using a 3rd party software.

Hmm, lol

Why the reluctance to share software title?

There's a company, not that well known, called Paragon, who make good disk management software, fair prices, works well.

 

[cenasteve]

Hi there,
I have seen all your comments, i would also like to share something regarding data recovery. I was using Mac OS and then after some days i found my volumes was unable to mount and seems totally dead. As i am from non technical back ground i am not much aware about the scenario. I am screwed because all my data in it is important. Please can anyone help by providing some links so as i can get all my data back. i have one download link but that is for trial version.

link is:::[mucks' edit].
please help

Regards
Steve

 

[Silverhazesurfer]

Longest spam trap in history.