Hard Drive Problem #1:
The hard drive is not showing up in “My Computer” or in Windows Explorer (not to be confused with internet explorer).
Generally, I get phone calls where the customer states that the computer is no longer seeing their hard drive.
I always try to ascertain if that is actually what is occurring or if it is more that the drive no longer has a drive letter attached to it.
If you click on your Windows start button and then look for “Computer”, right click on it and then click on manage.
A program should open called Computer Management.
Click on “Disk Management” under the Storage heading.
This will open up an area that will allow you to see all the mass storage devices connected to your computer.
In the disk manager you can see both the physical and the logical hard drives connected to the computer. In the illustration above it is clear that we have 3 physical drives connected to the machine. Disk 0 is the drive not showing up in my computer. You can see that this is because Windows is reporting it as unallocated space. This would be caused by the Master Boot Record (MBR or Partition Sector) being bad or corrupt. It is great news that it is showing up because now I can try data recovery software to recover it.
I recommend a few different options:
1. You can download our Windows Surface Scanner which is free and run it to see if the drive has any bad sectors. If it does this means the drive has physical damage and you should try cloning it off with a forensic cloner like Speed Clone. If cloning does not work then I would suggest calling a hard drive recovery company like ours. If you do not have any bad sectors then move to option 2.
2. Download the Recover It All data recovery software and run the demo. This software will also give you a bad sector count, if you get a lot of bad sectors it is advisable to clone the drive before going any further. If there is no bad sectors then I would just continue the scans, make sure you are seeing your data and if so purchase Recover It All.
Now if the drive is not showing up in the disk manager either then at this point if the drive is in an enclosure you should try to remove it from the enclosure. NOTE: In most cases this will void the manufacturer warranty. If the drive is not in an enclosure (external hard drive) then your best bet is going to be to call a data recovery company like DTIData.com
this helped me lot to solve my problem
Will this process work on sd cards (microSD) as well or is the software made for only hard drives?
Hi Paul,
If your card is indicating it needs to be formatted etc… Yes, you can try the same process.
Yes, it should work for cards that are connected via a card reader or plugged directly into the computer. Additionally, your card should be a FAT file system.
What if the External Hard Drive doesn’t show up on the Disk Management?
If the external hard drive does not show up in disk management the hard drive or the e drive enclosure is not working.
So what to do if the enclosure is not working ?
You can take it out of the enclosure.
We have a how to for hard drive recovery here.
http://www.dtidata.com/resourcecenter/2010/09/16/tutorial-how-to-slave-a-sata-hard-drive-via-usb/
please help me. i am beginner. my office computer went black and not opening. the service person says hard disk corrupted. how to find it is correct
We will be happy to help you with your hard drive recovery. However, we will need some details. Please provide as many as possible or contact us.
i have a laptop i am formatting it with xp cd. after some time the display showing hard drive is not found,and showing only one on screen f3=exit.. please how to slove this problem.
There should be an option to go into Setup or into the BIOS. I would check and make sure the system is detecting your hard drive.
I have 2 laptop harddrives that I installed operating systems on and they worked for a couple of boots. They now give a msg saying missing operating system and when I view them in easeus partion software it comes up that the harddrives are no longer partitioned. Could you tell me what would possibly be causing these harddrives to lose thier partitions. TIA
Hi, that would be a very speculative answer. However, you can use Win Hex and our tutorials to find out what is missing or wrong with the drive.
Hello,
I am trying to retrieve files from the hard drive in my desktop.I have the hard drive connected via SATA/USB Cable. It doesn’t show up in My Computer, however when I go to Disk Management, a box pops up asking me to initialize the Disk. Do I choose the MBR or the GPT option? I just want my files, photos and music that is on that hard drive.
Thank you
Your should run data recovery software to recover the data on the hard drive. I would not format nor initialize the drive.
Greetings,
Having an issue closely related to this post –
On a windows vista machine (HP TouchSmart) the C: is showing up in “Windows Explorer” but shows it as being “6.0 GB of 6.0 GB” full; this is a 500 GB Drive. Vista was locking up at every turn. I yanked the HD from the box and put it into a working XP machine and showed the same stuff in “Explorer”; however, it shows the correct info in Disk Manager (and in BIOS for that matter). I’ve run the Seagate tool package, which says the drive fails a key test, so I’m now trying to just clone it to get the important data off of it – this hasn’t been working so well. I’ve even run chkdisk – it never completes. I think the drive might be failing, but I’m really hoping it’s not some sort of dirty virus. Many apologies for the long post.
Any guidance is much appreciated.
Hi Jim,
Unfortunately, this is not a virus. Cloning a drive sector by sector would not be a problem if it were a virus, nor would check disk fail to complete. This is your hard drive failing.
Sorry,
Thanks for the reply David. Just wanted to check if these symptoms indicated some obscure virus before I play with the HD in another machine and possibly infect it.
You’re welcome, good luck.
Hi I have a gateway gt5465e when I try to install a 3rd hdd it doesn’t show up I know that the hdd is in working order and that it will show up if i disconnect my 2nd drive but will not show up in bios as a 3rd drive either what could the problem be I have 4 sata ports on my mobo and an ide port the IDE runs my dvd-r and nothing else
When you say it doesn’t show up are you saying Windows does not see the drive or the system BIOS does not recognize it? Check Disk Management in Windows to see if the drive itself is being seen.
Hi, I’ve got a PC running Windows 8. Have attached an external hard drive that is formatted for a Mac. I have a program that I was hoping could read it – HFSExplorer. But the drive doesn’t appear under My Computer. Having run disk management I can see the drive there. It has 3 partitions, 2 Healthy 200mMB & 465GB and 1 Unallocated 128MB.
There are files on the disk that I want to copy to the PC but I can’t find any way to access the drive.
Any help or suggestions please?
Thanks in advance…
Hi Josh, try Mac Drive. Or, you can download a Mac Data recovery program that runs in windows.
Good luck.
hello’
i have many doubts regarding no. of hdd connection.1.If 2hdd will be connected 2 a pc then whether we have 2 partition and format each hdd one by one?
2.if both the hdd will b partitioned and formatted then what will be the total secondary storage?
3.whether each hdd can have drive letter from c 2 z or both the hdd have drive letter from c 2 z combiningly?
4.whether we can create maximum 4 partition on each hdd or 4 partition on both the hdd combiningly?
5.can we istall same os on two drives?
6.if two hdd has already formatted and both are installed with winxp.if i will connect both as master .then how it will work?how i can retrive data from secondary hdd to primary?
7if in the previous question if both the hdd have different os then how it will work?how we will retrive data from both???
plz reply soon………
Hi, Well there was a lot there and I am not sure I understand all of the questions but I will try to answer. First, I don’t know if these drives are PATA or SATA. If they are PATA then you will need to jumper the drives to Master, Slave or Cable Select. Master would be the end of the IDE cable and Slave the inner connection. SATA is pretty much plug and play.
To answer your questions do these drive need to be formatted; Yes, assuming they are not partitioned and formatted already.
I am not sure how to answer your question about drive storage. The amount of storage would be the just less then the size of the drive. You could choose to SPAN these drives in Windows and make one large drive consisting of both drives. To answer your question about getting data from a boot drive that has XP and another that has another OS, I would need to know the OS. For example if the other drive had Mac OSX you could use Mac drive or some other Windows OSX reader to access data. Similarly, you could do the same for some other operating systems.
I hope I was able to answer some of your questions.
Good luck.
David,
Good posts in this site and it gives lot of ideas for affected people like me.
I’ve an issue with my Seagate Expansion Portable 500GB
I use to connect this with WD media player and watch movies.
It’s been working well for past 1.5 years but week back, it reported “Format Not Recognized” while playing a movie.
I switched off the player, removed the drive and connected to my machine.
It did not boot up in my Win 7 32-bit machine and it did not show up in My Computer.
Went to disk management, no drive there. After 30 minutes, drive comes comes there (in logic disks) in disk management area as “2048 GB Unallocated” with label as “disk0 Unknown”.
What could be the problem here ? Is there any sector issue or head in the disk got struck or anything else?
I tried all sorts of recovery options like FDisk till change of controller chip, but nothing worked.
Please suggest me how to resolve this issue. At least i want the data of 360 GB back.
Note: 1. When tried to initialize the disk, it said “Could not find the sector requested”.
2. Sector view in Hex Editor said Sector 0 as Invalid Partition Table and Invalid Operating system
3. When i tried Partition recovery options, drive stays read only.
Please help and thanks in advance !
Vivek
Hi,
Well your drive should appear in Disk Management much sooner then 30 minutes. It sounds as if the drive itself is failing to read.
Trying to recover portable USB HD but, while it shows up in disk mgmt as healthy drive (it is not), it does not appear in Surface Scanner or Recover It. C: and D: drives also do not appear. Windows 7. Ideas? Thanks.
Does the full size of the drive appear in disk management?
Hi There,
Lots of useful information are there in this i should say.
My problem is as follows: I have a 500 GB HDD and i used to watch movies stored in it and it acts as a backup for my digital files. I forgot to remove this once while shutting down and after that while switching on – the monitor was just blinking and I noticed that the HDD is still connected to teh desktop (my system is a win xp – dual core – 2 GB RAM – 320 GB HDD). I removed the HDD and the system got switched on. After that I could notice that the system is very slow in booting up. Does this happens if the system tried to boot up through the portable HDD drive? – what is the solution or how to increase teh booting speed to the normal one. Thanks in advance.
Hi,
I would think that you are booting slower because the Operating System is looking at another device and confirming it is safe to boot while it is attached. I do not think your system would be looking to boot from an external device as the primary OS. However, you can look in the BIOS and check your boot options.
Good luck
Hello,
Great page! I have an portable USB hard drive which has recently stopped showing up under My Computer, Disk Management. Under the Surface Scanner, it shows up as [USB Unknown 0.00 GB]. Windows XP. The drive makes half-hearted whirring noises when you plug it in, then stops. Any ideas? Thanks!
Yes, it is physically damaged. If you want to get data from you will need to send it in.
thanks.
Hi All,
as it seems that a lot of knowledge and experiences are present here, i would like to ask for help.
I have a strange problem with two of nine disk in my desktop PC.
The system was running since more than a year without any problem, but suddenly I get the following problem (OS Windows 7 Ultimate x64):
Now two disk (each 1TB) are shown as not initialized and with wrong size (first as 500GB and second as 1.363GB) in the “Disk Manager”!
What I did is that I rearranged the disk on the controller, but this should not cause a problem normally.
I know that I used this disk in the past in a RAID (both in different ones), but this is long time ago and the disks working in this setup since a long time. The disks are OK, because I can use it normally (also show correct in the “Disk Manager”) on another Windows 7 and a Windows 8 instance installed on the same machine. Also under Linux it is shown correctly.
When I start “Disk Management” it ask me to initialize the disk but fails with the error message “The system cannot find the file specified”. That makes a bit sense because the shown size is absolutely crap.
They are also not shown as disk in the device manager but with the old RAID names.
When I have a look on the disk with diskpart, it shows me that the disks are from type “RAID”.
DISKPART> list disk
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
——– ————- ——- ——- — —
Disk 0 Online 1863 GB 0 B
* Disk 1 Online 500 GB 500 GB
Disk 2 Online 1363 GB 1363 GB
Disk 3 Online 931 GB 0 B
Disk 4 Online 1863 GB 0 B
Disk 5 Online 476 GB 0 B
Disk 6 Online 238 GB 0 B
Disk 7 Online 119 GB 8073 MB
Disk 8 Online 238 GB 50 GB
DISKPART> select disk 1
Disk 1 is now the selected disk.
DISKPART> attributes disk
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only : No
Boot Disk : No
Pagefile Disk : No
Hibernation File Disk : No
Crashdump Disk : No
Clustered Disk : No
DISKPART> detail disk
System
Disk ID: 00000000
Type : RAID
Status : Online
Path : 0
Target : 1
LUN ID : 0
Location Path : PCIROOT(0)#RAID(P00T01L00)
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only : No
Boot Disk : No
Pagefile Disk : No
Hibernation File Disk : No
Crashdump Disk : No
Clustered Disk : No
There are no volumes.
When i do it on the second W7 instance they are shown as type SATA.
DISKPART> list disk
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
——– ————- ——- ——- — —
Disk 0 Online 931 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 1863 GB 1024 KB
Disk 2 Online 931 GB 1024 KB
Disk 3 Online 931 GB 1024 KB
Disk 4 Online 1863 GB 1024 KB
Disk 5 Online 476 GB 0 B
Disk 6 Online 238 GB 0 B
Disk 7 Online 119 GB 8073 MB
Disk 8 Online 238 GB 50 GB
DISKPART> select disk 2
Disk 2 is now the selected disk.
DISKPART> attributes disk
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only : No
Boot Disk : No
Pagefile Disk : No
Hibernation File Disk : No
Crashdump Disk : No
Clustered Disk : No
DISKPART> detail disk
SAMSUNG HD103SJ ATA Device
Disk ID: C152A635
Type : SATA
Status : Online
Path : 1
Target : 0
LUN ID : 0
Location Path : PCIROOT(0)#PCI(1F02)#ATA(C01T00L00)
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only : No
Boot Disk : No
Pagefile Disk : No
Hibernation File Disk : No
Crashdump Disk : No
Clustered Disk : No
Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
———- — ———– —– ———- ——- ——— ——–
Volume 4 Y Data_Y1 NTFS Partition 931 GB Healthy
The disk mapping is as follow:
Corrupted Working
Disk 1 Disk 2
I tried to delete the disk in the registry from the HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Enum tree (from the other Instance and from installation CD (HKLM/System/ControlSet001/Enum)) but it always come back faulty after the reboot.
I guess that the problem is anywhere in the registry. Do somebody knows where the links from the enum tree and the PnP stuff of windows are?
For me it seems that W7 is always take an old configuration to initialize the disks.
Thank You in advance
Achim
Hi i have a Toshiba 1TB external drive that Windows 8 won’t see (neither from disk management, nor file explorer). The light is on when plugged and disk spins but nothing happens. How can i tel if the disk is damaged (new) or if it is a compatibility issue?
Thanks
Hi, Disk Management should be able to see all attached storage media. Do you see any error messages like “Windows could not install this device”?
I just got a new pc running windows 8. I installed a software and when I restarted the pc as requested, it could not boot to the desktop. I tried connecting the drive to another working pc as secondary, the working pc would not boot to the desktop, when i removed the secondary drive, the pc will boot to the desktop. I have formatted, delete and re-created a single partition hoping it would work so i can use file recovery to recover my files but it wouldn’t format either and it still does the same thing when I try to boot it as secondary drive with the working pc. I have very important files inside that i have to recover. I desperately need help.
Hi Pazzo, what did you format and create another partition on?
The data recovery tools you suggested aren’t doing it for me: surface scanner won’t populate a list of devices, and Recover it all I can’t get to detect anything either, which is weird since I can clearly see my device in the windows device manager and disk manager. whats going on?
You may need to right click on the program icon and run them as an administrator.
Thanks for the response. So that helped me to run Surface Scan (haven’t tried the other program yet), however the result of my scan was kind of weird: each block produced the same error of “The media is write protected”. Hope there is still hope left for my files, and thanks for your time by the way!
Great help thank you