Drive Error

[Flozz]

Basically i cannot use my second drive I can not even get on it

i think i may have made it an active drive or somthing like that


i have tried going computer properties then drive...
i have tried gparted live
Ive tried clone zilla


basically i just want to get whats on it before i format my laptop.
how should i go about this think i may have to access this in boot because I cannot access it in windows.

Ive got a 500gb external hard drive so that may help.

edit. hard drive is not the problem

[Vicious88]

With it being an external, odds are it has some odd-ball peice of software designed by the manufacturer to allow access to the driver -- whether this piece of software is a back-up utility ot whatever, it may be required to be in place in order for you to use it properly.

Try going to the manufacturer's website and downloading the most up-to-date piece of software available for your product. Install it and see if you can access it.

If no software is available, consider that your computer might not be reading the drive at all.

If this is the case, make sure the drive is connected properly and powered on, then follow these quick steps in order to attempt to access the drive.

1) Open Device Manager (Right click on the "My Computer Icon", go to "Properties", then click on the Hardware tab and select Device Manager).
2) Scan for new hardware in Device Manager (just right-click out to the side of your device list and the option to scan should be there, if not, explore the menu bar).
3) Let the scan finish and then close out the Device Manager.
4) Open the My Computer window (close and re-open if it was open during your scan), check to see if you have a new drive listed. If not, continue on with these steps.
5) Go to Control Panel and open up the Administrative Tools section (you may have to switch your control panel to classic view).
6) Open "Computer Management" and from the File Tree to the left, select disk management.
7) Check to see if your 500GB external is shown in the list. If it is, check that the drive is partitioned, allocated, and most importantly, assigned a drive letter -- you can do all three from this window, but bewarned the first two can result in data loss. Try assigning a drive letter FIRST and then, if required, do the other two steps at the risk of losing data.

Let me know if I've been of any help - hope I have.

[Flozz]

my external hard drive is not the problem that works


i have a laptop with the operating system windows vista
when i bought it it had 2 partitions (C: and E:)
i messed around with partitions then i lost drive E:
i now have bought a external hard drive
but now i want drive e: back with all its data (or just all its data) its not deleted but cant be accessed any advice maybe i can back it up onto my external hard drive

[Vicious88]

Use steps 5 through 7 I showed gave you in my previous post to access the Computer Management tool and see if you didn't un-allocate your E: Drive. Try re-assigning a drive letter to it, or if nothing else, just making sure that the drive is still visible in the Disk Managment window.

If it is visible in the Disk Management window, but not in the My Computer Window, than it may be hidden seeing as it's likely to be a restore partition. If you're wanting to copy data off of a restore partition the best way to do that is through use of a cleverly written batch script.

Anyway... If you can't get it to show up in the My Computer window, let me know and I'll begin work on a batch script.

[Flozz]

my disk management goes crazy each time i want to do anything to it

My disk management:
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/5627/07012009154834.png

The error
http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/2447/07012009154228.png

[Vicious88]

That might be because you're trying to allocate that last partition of the C: drive. That first block (the 1.46GB one) SHOULD be your restore partition. Simply assign it a drive letter by right clicking on that block and choosing the drive letter option.

That should make it show up as whatever drive letter you assigned it on the My Computer window. I'd go with a rarely used drive letter like "X" or something.

Since this is your computers restore partition, be sure to NOT delete anything from here, and avoid editing anything if you're not sure you know 1000% what you're doing. But if you're wanting to copy the data from here and burn it to a DVD so you can have a restore disk, than by all means, be my guest.

[Flozz]

any thing i do to the 53.67 drive gets the error

a restore disk? sounds like deleting data

and i want to get all the data to my hard drive because it will easily fit :)
More info:
DISKPART:
http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/1482/07022009173105.png

[Flozz]

im gonna try something but first i gotta back up my external hard drive ill update you how it goes.

[Flozz]

success i now have duel booted linux and vista and converted my external hard drive to fat32

[Vicious88]

Kudos to you, Flozz on your success. And an extra Kudos to claiming Infohub's first Triple Post, lol -- try not to do it again, lol.

[Flozz]

sorry :(
just they are all so different