Desperate help with external hard drive

den

den

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Dennis
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Hi, i have got a massive problem with my external hard drive ,a toshiba 1tb ,i have a home pc with xp on and i plugged the hard drive in and i was doing a format and partition delete and i think i have accidentaly deleted the partition on my hard external hard drive ,so when i plug it in the laptop top i cannot view my photos i have saved.....it just says it is not suported with the file system ,i am a real mess as what i have done.Can any one please help.Thanks
 
Having just got over the panic and upset of possibly losing all my saved RAW photos ,i have now ,i think realised what i have done ,i was instaling a fresh version of XP on the desktop PC while my external hard drive was attatched and in my stupitity i have just clicked away and deleted a partition on my external hard drive with all my photos on .......Their was nearly 900GB on their ,when i attatch to win 7 it is not recognising the drive saying it does not recognise the file system or the volume is corrupted.Any help on what i can do would be really apreciated.Thanks
 
Do not write anything to that drive. Get some recovery software and run it, it might take a while for 900GB
 
I think you'd be better off erasing the drive and restoring the files from the last backup

Nick Froome
 
As Admirable says get some recovery software and try a recovery. You can get specialist partition recovery software that might do the trick. If doing this sort of thing is something you are not comfortable with in any way, get someone that knows what they are doing to do it.
 
As others have said: don't use that drive at all for anything but disc recovery. As things stand, all the data's likely to be there, just not currently accessible - but if you use the disc, then the actual data will start getting overwritten.

One thing to note is that some recovery software will recover the files onto a different, good disc, whilst some will actually repair the bad drive's filesystem in situ. If you wind up going with the former, you'll need to have as much free disk space somewhere else as you're trying to recover.

For the former, I've had success on both occasions with photorec (free, various OSs) for recovering just image/video files; for the latter, DiskWarrior's saved my bacon a couple times (OS X only, definitely not free), such as one time a badly seated board was causing occasional corruptions on bit 30.
 
Superscan finished scanning and i can see all my folders ,problem is i dont know the procedure for getting them recovered......i may have to take it in to a shop....as i don't understand all the tech terms etc.May be safer to let someone look at it .
 
Shawforth is 7 miles from rochdale (north) i also work in Rochdale.....i can see the folders and i have paid for the software it's knowing how to get them back on to the drive which is showing as E: very frustrating .....i also have a chap who wants to publish a shot of a rough legged buzzard which is on the drive as raw file......sods law.....PS all you replies have been appreciated.
 
Bit late now but for the future do what I do. I ALWAYS download all photos from the camera to disk first (usually a DVD one), thats before I do ANYTHING else. Next it goes onto the computer and then onto extrnl hard drive. I never fully trust computers as I had a horrendous hard drive crash and "lost" 4000 clients records. Luckily my local computer shop expert managed to extract the data even though the disk was a rightoff which went back to the manufacturers and i got a replacement from them. Just a quick by the by hard disks often have a 3 year warrantee whatever the computer has.

Realspeed
 
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This case was a user error.....i still had my hard drive connected to a desktop pc when i was setting up a new OS on it ......while i was clicking away i deleted the external hard drives partition....all my folders are still on the drive it,s just getting to them.....i am going to have a rethink on my work flow after this .
 
Den

Whats the software your using. Most of the time you just right click the data and just copy and paste them somewhere else.

I live South Manchester so if you get really stuck I'll pop over to Bacup and give you some help. Just dont try doing anything your not sure of.

Rememeber you will need another drive to copy them to. Again if your stuck I have a spare 1tb you can borrow.
 
As I thought it's a simple file recovery and save program.

When you've done your scan you will need to highlight the directory you wish to recover, then clicking on one of the top icons it gives you a save to box.

Set that to save to one of your other drives and hit go. It will then save the directory and files.

When you've recovered all your pictures simply reformat your origional drive and copy everything back.
 
I am going home soon ,I will try that and let you when I do,,,,,,i dont have a 1tb hard drive to copy all the folders ,i will try to se if i can choose individual folders and test on a smaller hard drive ...if that works i will purchase a larger drive and send all of them to it.
 
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Got them all back.........:):):):):):):):) i hit a button that that said fix boot sector .........my hard drive came to life and was recognised in my computer ....must get another ex Hard drive now and do some back ups .Once again thanks all for the help(chris) as it was really appreciated.
 
den said:
Got them all back.........:):):):):):):):) i hit a button that that said fix boot sector .........my hard drive came to life and was recognised in my computer ....must get another ex Hard drive now and do some back ups .Once again thanks all for the help(chris) as it was really appreciated.
Click to expand...

pretty sure you couldve recreated the partition in disk management (dont select format) and that wouldve worked also.

but yes, 2 copies of your data at all times..
 
den said:
Got them all back.........:):):):):):):):) i hit a button that that said fix boot sector .........my hard drive came to life and was recognised in my computer ....must get another ex Hard drive now and do some back ups .Once again thanks all for the help(chris) as it was really appreciated.
Click to expand...

That's great news.

If you can, consider getting a couple of external drives just to back up to. Keep one in the house/office and keep one somewhere else, office/house, relatives etc. Rotate these drives as often as possible to keep them both up to date.

That way you are covered for certain extreme eventualities like flood, fire, theft. It is a horrible feeling thinking that you have lost all of your data like that.
 
It most certainly is a horrible feeling ,i suppose you take it for granted....i can get my pic published now......i am going to set myself a hard drive clean up day and purchase a second large drive.
 
The partition will show, but a quick google search would suggest the directory structure/file index would be initialised so the files would not be accessible.
 
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