500gb portable hard drive not working?

Q. It's an "iOmega" and it's not working on any of 4 different computers I tried. (3 windows xp, 1 Vista) the "safely remove hardware" tray icon appears, and when I click it it displays the hardware as "mass storage device" and when I go to the properties for the drivers, all of it seems to be in working order... my only problem is that it won't display in "My computer" ... I already had the portable drive partitioned and all my data was on it, I really don't want to lose all my stuff. this problem started this morning and it seemed like it happened for no reason...

I've read similar questions like this, and everybody says "right click my computer and go to manage>disc management and assign the hard drive a letter... my problem here is that I can't assign it a letter unless I partition it, then after that, I can't access my files unless I format the hard drive, which isn't going to happen since I want to keep my files.

I also already tried re-installing the drivers... that didn't work...

I'm affraid it may have overheated last night... it was really hot... but this early this morning it was working just fine, then I left my house for a few hours, when I came back, it wasn't working.

Please help! The is some stuff that is really important to me on there!

Answer
Use GNU TestDisk. It's totally amazing how well this works. I should know, since I'm the king of accidentally deleting partitions. :P

Here's a link, through CGsecurity's wiki: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I've only tried it in Linux, though, so I don't know how well it would work in any other environment. It does fix FAT/NTFS problems, though.

my portable seagat hard drive said that i need to reformat it but i want to save the files how do i do that?

Alisa

Answer
Use these programs:

- Recuva
http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download

- TestDisk & PhotoRec
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

- Zero Assumption Recovery
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/download.htm

Some guides:
http://www.guidingtech.com/2154/recover-deleted-files-recuva/
http://data-security-freeware.blogspot.it/2011/04/recuva-recover-deleted-files-for-free.html
http://www.geeksdo.com/freeware/recuva-tutorial.html
http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/how_to_recover_deleted_files.cfm
http://html5.litten.com/windows-file-recovery-series-part-2-recover-deleted-files-with-testdisk-and-photorec/
http://www.sevenforums.com/software/193467-guide-using-photorec-recovery-software.html
http://landscapephotographymagazine.com/2011/corrupted-memory-card/

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Title Post: 500gb portable hard drive not working?
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