HD not recognised

[Nick]

I have a 250Gb HD which I was connected to a XP machine through a usb
external box. Due to some problems with viruses etc I had to repair
xp. After the repair when I connect the Hd through usb, it gets picked
up as a usb device but does not appear in win explorer. If I go to
disk management it shows 'basic disk, online' and 'unallocated' on
right. THere is no way I can do anything with it.

If I take the Hd out of the external box and connect it directly to
mobo with a sata cable, still cant see it in explorer. In disk
management it shows same and doies initiazation etc but still does not
dhow up in explorer and hence cannot access files.

I though I hd was faulty so looked it at through a disk recovery
program. This reports hd to be ok and shows file structure perfectly
intact.

How can I get the hd to connect to xp either as usb device or as
internal hd?

 

[Nick]

The data on the HD is very important. Would it be better to just
recover the data to another drive and re-format this one?

 

[Bob H]

The data on the HD is very important. Would it be better to just
recover the data to another drive and re-format this one?

Yes, most definitly

 

[Shenan Stanley]

I have a 250Gb HD which I was connected to a XP machine through a
usb external box. Due to some problems with viruses etc I had to
repair xp. After the repair when I connect the Hd through usb, it
gets picked up as a usb device but does not appear in win explorer.
If I go to disk management it shows 'basic disk, online' and
'unallocated' on right. THere is no way I can do anything with it.

If I take the Hd out of the external box and connect it directly to
mobo with a sata cable, still cant see it in explorer. In disk
management it shows same and doies initiazation etc but still does
not dhow up in explorer and hence cannot access files.

I though I hd was faulty so looked it at through a disk recovery
program. This reports hd to be ok and shows file structure perfectly
intact.

How can I get the hd to connect to xp either as usb device or as
internal hd?

The data on the HD is very important. Would it be better to just
recover the data to another drive and re-format this one?

Without a doubt - you want to end up formatting this drive in the end.

First - you have to get the data off...

When you hook it up via USB - can you assign it a drive letter in Disk
Manager (without formatting it.)
Does it work on any other machine as an USB drive?
If you hook it up internally - can you make an image (using something like
BootItNG, Ghost, TrueImage?) of it?

 

[Nick]

I cant allocate a drive letter to it; there is no option to do this. I
am slowly getting the data off it using data recovery software. Once I
have got all data I am going to re-format it and use it as an internal
drive.