Hi. I'm currently using a P4 with XP SP2. Have a couple of HDD in it, partitioning into C, E, F, G. This is my 2nd PC. D & H drives are DVD-writers. The problem is not with these drives but the internal HDD from my old PC. Bear with me, readers! My old PC (my 1st PC) is screwed so I decided to take the HDD from my old PC & connected it to my new PC via USB to SATA / IDE cable. So my old HDD (C & D drive in my old PC back then) are now I & J drive to my new PC respectively. It's a 40GB HDD partitioned equally into 2 (obviously!). I can view / navigate through the I drive but not the J drive. In Windows Explorer, it doesn't have a figure for "Total Size" or "Free Space". When I click on the J drive, I got "disc not formated. Do you want to format it" message? Of course I don't, I want to explore it. I have not re-formatted my I & J drives before, since I bought it years ago, just to point that out. So is it possible to recover the contents of my J drive? I know I can jusr format the J drive to re-use it but I will lose all its contents. I hope the tale above makes sense .. ask me for more info it it doesn't. CHEERS!
Hi I haven't "temp slave" it because I don't wanna open my new PC myself in case I screw up my new PC. That's why I got myself that USB to SATA / IDE cable, to use the old HDD externally. I opened up my old PC to get that old HDD coz it (my old PC) was screwed anyway. I forgot to mention that the 1st time hooked up my I & J drive to my new PC via USB to SATA / IDE cable, both I & J drive worked. However, I must have "stupidly" manually deleted some files & folders from the I & J drives to make some space but they were just stuff I don't need (e.g. media files, dvd rippers, media players, anti-virus/spyware progs etc) but nothing major like Systems folder. The next time I rebooted my PC, Explorer makes no mention of Total Size / Free Space of my J drive (thou it's still listed). I hope my J drive is still recoverable by using some reliable software.
It sometimes happens to HDD drives attached via USB that the filesystem can get damaged, that is, important filesystem structures e.g. file allocation tables can get corrupted and/or over-written. (That can happen to hard drives attached in the normal way too). These USB - to HDD cables can be a bit unreliable, in fact USB connections are not as reliable as connecting a drive internally. There is data recovery software you can get which MIGHT be able to recover stuff, sometimes the filenames/folders are lost so you just get a whole bunch of recovered files with names like File000001, FileFile000002, File000003 etc. If the recovered files run into the hundreds this may not be much help. There are some free tools at this site http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/system/fwdatarecovery.html I don't know where you live, but in England, PC World offer a data recovery service at £99 ($200 approx) per disk, which seems a pretty normal price. There is paid for software you can get at about half that.
Hi errr .. I'm in Asia. So give me a list of the top10 software I can try to use (the paid-for ones). In particular I'm looking for a software that put my J drive the way it was rather than recovery it to another drive.
