Hard drive problems?!?

Kitts

My external hard drive case broke and I took it out of the case, plugged it into my computer and now I got to to be able to detect it, I see it in MY COMPUTER but when I double click, it says you have to format it before you can use it, formatting erases all data, which I dont want to do. How do I access it without formatting it

Answer
Right Click on the drive and go to explore. It should let you see the contents of the drive. I would then copy the contents to another location even if its the main hard drive (provided you have adequate space) then format the drive. Move everything back to the drive after the format is complete.

Edit:
With the jobs that I have worked we used a high power magnet to wipe data off of hard drives, tapes, and reels. This magnet is so strong I can walk around the demagnetize room holding a hard drive stuck to this magnet. And that was the small portable hand held unit which held the drive as I walked. The degausser which is the bigger unit can pull a hard drive out of my hand from a certain distance.

So now that you have an idea of what magnets can do to a hard drive I don't know about listening to Mr 25 Year Experience. Besides that silver part that he is talking about gets corrupted as it was never held by human hands so your fingerprints and the oils on your skin do quite a number on it (destroying all data).

Edit:
As for the right click explore method I talk about. As long as you can see the drive in My Computer (as you stated) the explore method will work. However, if its bigger than your OS hard drive you are going to have some problems as it will default to the larger drive and not see an OS on it.

Portable hard drive issues?

Kyouya's G

Re post because the other one is getting no help

I'm not a computer genius so if anyone has anything to help please tell me how to get there and what to do in step by step or else I might get lost.

My portable hard drive won't work. It usually auto runs when I plug it in then I view it as a folder, or sometimes, I go to My computer and it's there as another local disk.

Neither of these things are happening and I don't know why. It shows up the on my taskbar just as being able to be safely removed and I checked it's properties in the device manager and it says it's running fine.

I even tried to uninstall the driver but that didn't work.

Any ideas? I'm positive there's no viruses on it and windows says it's working fine I just can't figure out why I can't access it.
Can I use Partition Magic to help?
***********I FIXED MY OWN PROBLEM***********

I'm going to put what I did for future help for others. READ STEPS BEFORE TAKING THEM, DOWNLOADS ARE NECESSARY FOR MY FIX.

1. Go to Start < Run < type "compmgmt.msc" NO ""
2. In the Computer Management window select Disk Management under Storage in the left panel.
3. Find your device. I didn't notice it at first because mine was labeled "Disk 1" Tip: Unplug your portable then plug it in because the window will update immediately, that's how to find the right one.
4. See if the disk is assigned a drive letter. If you're having my problem it won't have one. If you do you can try skipping some of the next steps, but I'm not sure it'll work for any other problem.
5. Right click the disk. Tip: Don't click the box where it says Disk #, click the wider box to the right with the info in it.

*continuing in another edit*
6. Create a partition and follow the steps. Now you're device will be recognized and show up in the My Computer folder again under whatever drive letter you assigned.

7. Now if you try to click the drive in My Computer it's going to ask you to format. Formating erases everything and I was not able to find a way to get the files without erasing BUT, I found a way to get them after erasing. So if you read through everything then format the drive.

8. Here's why I said to read through, to get through this step you need to download a program. Either legally or illegally, whatever you want to do. If you download and need a key, email me, just put it in the subject or I might delete. The program you need is. Recover My Files. I stand by this and it supposedly works for recovering files from other places even ones never saved. It recovered everything even stuff I had long since deleted on my portable hard drive.

*continuing*
9. After you download the program it won't ask you for a key until you need to save your files. Scan for what you're looking for, but don't do a quick scan. You'll have to select all the file types you want to find. This is good if you are only looking for one specific or a few specific things. I needed to restore mostly my movies/anime. This will take AWHILE depending on what you want and how many files were once where you're looking. Make sure you have stable power because I got all the way to the end of a 3 hour search and my comp turned off.
10. After the search you'll have to go through the list to find what you want, I suggest searching by name, file size or type.

After that just save the files (I put them on the desktop so they wouldn't mix up with my other files) and you're done! Worked like a charm. Hopefully it works for everyone else.

Answer
Well, one of two things have happened.

A. The Hard Drive is failing and the partition table information was on the portion of the disc that is damaged.

2. The controller has failed and is not allowing the drive to communicate with the computer.

What you need to do is go to your start menu and click "run" and type "diskmgmt.msc" into the dialog box. If you have vista, just type that into the field on the start menu.

This will bring up a window that lists the drives installed on your computer. Find the one that is associated with the drive you are having issues with and check to see if it recognizes a partition or not. If not, then the partition is bad and you would need to recreate it and reformat it.

The problem with that is that doing so will erase all the data on the drive. So if there is important stuff on it, you should go to a repair shop and see if they can recover the data.

If you don't mind losing the data that was on the drive, then simply right click on the drive in question and select "format" then just set it to "NTFS" and hit Ok.

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