We bought a Western Digital external hard drive a year or so ago and it crapped out on us after about 3 months. I'd say don't buy them. Anyway, I just pulled the hard drive out and installed it in my wife's Dell XPS 720. The computer recognizes the hard drive, but it won't let me access it from My Computer or anything. This is the first time I've ever installed a secondary hard drive. Is there a magic step somewhere that I don't know about to make the drive accessible?
Quote from: makenzie71 on January 11, 2009, 09:05:53 AM
We bought a Western Digital external hard drive a year or so ago and it crapped out on us after about 3 months. I'd say don't buy them. Anyway, I just pulled the hard drive out and installed it in my wife's Dell XPS 720. The computer recognizes the hard drive, but it won't let me access it from My Computer or anything. This is the first time I've ever installed a secondary hard drive. Is there a magic step somewhere that I don't know about to make the drive accessible?
sooo, the USB/firewire/whatever board was shot, but the harddrive was supposedly fine ?
you're going to have a corrupted filesystem at least, and a crapped partition.
if it has stuff on it you really care about, start getting at it with PerfectDisk or whatever freebie you want. xp is complete crap when it comes to filesystem errors: "I can't fix it without a re-format!" it whines.
i'd make a disk image dump to another BIG harddrive before I started trying to repair things though ;)
there are tons of windows tools for this, but i've thankfully forgotten most of them ! :D
Nah the external hd was damaged when we moved. I took it to our pc guy at work and he said the hard drive was good it was just the little controller board had a broken gadget. WD says they'll replace the thing but that they can't do anything about the data on it.
I mean that may still leave the system data on the drive all screwy but still.
Biggest issue I can see is that the hard drive isn't assigned a letter. How do I assign a new hard drive a letter?
Good advice to get some freeware first, and get the data out or save an image, THEN set it up to work. (majorgeeks or pcworld or sourceforge for freeware)
You might try something like
settings ->
control panel ->
administrative tools ->
computer management ->
storage ->
disk management
glad that isn't hard to find. so obvious, really.
this WILL overwrite at least some data on assigning new drive letter.
you may not be able to access any of your old data.
this may even require you to reformat the whole thing, so you would then not be able to use recovery software later.
freakin computers
I don't think there's anything on the drive that absolutely needs to be saved, but I suppose it would be better to make sure. I looked up perfect disk and all I saw were defrag tools, not recovery tools. Is that what I'm looking for? Are there any other specific programs that are good for this type of thing?
I also just checked for kicks...in disk management it won't let me change/assign a letter to the new drive. It has that option grayed out when I right-click it.
Hi,
Are we talking IDE or SATA hard drives?
If it's an IDE drive (the wide cable) there will be a jumper on the drive to configure it either the master drive or the slave drive on that IDE channel. (Note that an IDE channel can support two IDE drives in a master/slave configuration.) The "Cable Select" jumper setting usually works fine if both of the drives are set for CS. Otherwise, set the drive on the end of the cable as hte master and the one in the middle of the cable as the slave (OK, that's primary and secondary for you Politically Correct types).
Then, make sure both drives are recognized in the BIOS setup. The BIOS setup is usually accessed by pressing the <Del> key right after you turn on the computer. Except, of course, Dell uses the <F2> key to enter the BIOS setup. Verify that the secondary drive is recognized in the BIOS. Usually, if you configure the IDE settings for "Auto", it will be recognized.
Once the drive is recognized in BIOS, then boot to the OS. Use the Drive Manager to first 'partition' the drive, then 'format' the drive. Then the operating system will assign it a drive letter, or you can assign one manually.
If it's a SATA drive, there is no master/slave configuration. Each drive gets its own channel. But the same procedure applies. Plug it in, make sure it is recognized in the BIOS, partition, then format.
Thank you for your indulgence,
BassCliff
Okay so I'm going to have to format it...that's fine. How do I go about doing that? The disk manager gives me a "delete partition" option...what does that do?
That will delete the basic partition information which also in theory erases all the data contained in the partition.
how do I go about just reformatting it? Since it doesn't have a drive letter designation, and won't let me assign one to it, I can't go to a command prompt and type format d:
well if you can delete the partition information and then repartition and reformat that partition that is one way. However if the disk controller is shot it will likely stop working before you can create a fresh partition so there isn't anything you could do beside physically damage the platters.
Quote from: makenzie71 on January 11, 2009, 10:33:01 AM
I don't think there's anything on the drive that absolutely needs to be saved, but I suppose it would be better to make sure. I looked up perfect disk and all I saw were defrag tools, not recovery tools. Is that what I'm looking for? Are there any other specific programs that are good for this type of thing?
they used to have some recovery tools. sorry, i really am not famliiar with windows stuff anymore.
formatting: startup your computer with the harddrive set as 'slave' and the other (one you usually boot from) set as master on the same IDE cable. xp will whine about having 28 days in a month that matter, and how it can't do a thing without formatting that volume. format it. use ntfs, cause it sucks less than fat32.
enjoy
hope you had backups of the stuff that mattered on in :)
These are SATA drives...so no master/slave stuff.
There's a "format" option when I right-click the drive in my computer, but it always says "format failed". Is there another way I can do it?
Quote from: makenzie71 on January 11, 2009, 08:26:08 PM
These are SATA drives...so no master/slave stuff.
There's a "format" option when I right-click the drive in my computer, but it always says "format failed". Is there another way I can do it?
no in that case the disk controller itself is dead, that is unless you have something that can pump out enough Gauss to repolarize the platters.
edit: However you might try a bootable linux distro like Knoppix, sometimes that will work with hard drives to gone for windowz
set your main pc's hdd as master and the damaged one as slave see if you can access it then
set pc hdd as master damaged 0ne as slave
SATA drives don't set as master/slave.
they do depending on how they arecabled in, i knbow mine does. Edit: i stand corrected, sata 1, 2 etc. not master/slave
You can try the diagnostic and setup tools from Western Digital, see if they can resurrect the drive. Try a low-level format (writes all zeros to the drive, or is it all ones?).
Go here:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?level1=6&lang=en
...download the tools for your drive (Data Lifeguard Tools and/or Diagnostics). There are Windows versions you can try, but what usually works the best is the DOS version that runs from a floppy. Just be careful not to format your good drive. Maybe you can disconnect the "good" drive, leave the "bad" drive connected, boot from the Data Lifeguard Tools floppy (instructions on how to make the floppy are on the website), and run the low level format. The tool can also help you prepare it to be used in a Windows XP system.
Thank you for your indulgence,
BassCliff
i had to do this with a friends maxtor the other day using maxblast. cause a slave format, erased BOTH the master and the slave. i was not amused. a 20 minute job turned into 2 hours. non paid. i volunteered to help wiht this, provided tehy feed me. lol but time runneth over lol >:(
Mak, in my experience if Windows does not automatically assign a letter then the drive is bricked. It means that the master boot table (or whatever it's called) is corrupt or there is damage to the controller. Depending on what exactly is wrong you may be able to use a low-level utility from the manufacturer to format it (and lose all your data) or image the drive but I've never had any luck doing so.
I also had an external drive fail recently on my work machine but was able to remove it from the enclosure and hook it up internally with no problems, data intact.
Quote from: Mandres on January 12, 2009, 09:09:14 PM
Mak, in my experience if Windows does not automatically assign a letter then the drive is bricked. It means that the master boot table (or whatever it's called) is corrupt or there is damage to the controller. Depending on what exactly is wrong you may be able to use a low-level utility from the manufacturer to format it (and lose all your data) or image the drive but I've never had any luck doing so.
I also had an external drive fail recently on my work machine but was able to remove it from the enclosure and hook it up internally with no problems, data intact.
What he said ↑↑↑
Quote from: yamahonkawazuki on January 12, 2009, 09:15:13 PM
Quote from: Mandres on January 12, 2009, 09:09:14 PM
Mak, in my experience if Windows does not automatically assign a letter then the drive is bricked. It means that the master boot table (or whatever it's called) is corrupt or there is damage to the controller. Depending on what exactly is wrong you may be able to use a low-level utility from the manufacturer to format it (and lose all your data) or image the drive but I've never had any luck doing so.
I also had an external drive fail recently on my work machine but was able to remove it from the enclosure and hook it up internally with no problems, data intact.
What he said ↑↑↑
+1
Quote from: BassCliff on January 11, 2009, 11:15:25 PM
You can try the diagnostic and setup tools from Western Digital, see if they can resurrect the drive. Try a low-level format (writes all zeros to the drive, or is it all ones?).
Go here:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?level1=6&lang=en
...download the tools for your drive (Data Lifeguard Tools and/or Diagnostics). There are Windows versions you can try, but what usually works the best is the DOS version that runs from a floppy. Just be careful not to format your good drive. Maybe you can disconnect the "good" drive, leave the "bad" drive connected, boot from the Data Lifeguard Tools floppy (instructions on how to make the floppy are on the website), and run the low level format. The tool can also help you prepare it to be used in a Windows XP system.
BassCliff
+ 1 to this...