External Hard drive issue win 10 pro

illusions · 01 May 2020

Hiya Guys and Gals.

My old win 10 HD wouldnt boot, I tried the turn off 3 times and waited for the "Repair Screen" to appear which kinda did then went blank took about 20 mins for it too work out what job it was supposed to be doing like bringing up the options menu. I went into CMD mode did a chkdsk and it said all was fine. however when i tried the repair auto it just went into a constant loop infact i left it going for about 2 hours and took the kettle for a walk.

Anyway long story shoer i bought another HD reinstalled windows 10 pro no issues at all. I have an external drive plate which i can insert my old HD just to try and retrieve some data however it shows up on the THIS PC screen but as Local F: but has no size or other usual info only another drive letter D which says "System Reserved" also my old drive doesnt show up on the Disk Management screen.. Can anyone help me try get my data back or at least slap me about the head so im not awake all night mesing about with this thing...

Kind Regards

Samuria · 01 May 2020

POst a screen shot from disk manager showing all the details it may just need a drive letter assigned

Bree · 01 May 2020

...or it may have corrupted its partition(s) and be shown as RAW. Either way a screenshot of Disk Management will help a lot in diagnosis.

Disk Management - How to Post a Screenshot of

illusions · 11 May 2020

Sorry for my very late reply the only thing Disk management shows is C drive and doesnt show F at all infact C is the only visible drive available.

Bree · 11 May 2020

illusions said:

Sorry for my very late reply the only thing Disk management shows is C drive and doesnt show F at all infact C is the only visible drive available.

A screenshot would still help. We'd like to see what, if anything, it shows for the space not occupied by C:

spunk · 13 May 2020

is there more then one Disk in Disk Management? (ie) Disk 0, Disk 1 etc. If so, in the lower pane, If the secondary drive say it's Unallocated Space? Or at the Disk # does it say it is Not Initialized? If no other drive then the other drive is not plugged in or has Failed. If it is recognized but no file system, then you can use Data Recovery software to recover your files. I have had the best luck with GetDataback. a paid software program

Pejole2165 · 13 May 2020

Before taking any other action on the disk, if you can view it in disk management regardless of whether or not you can see any partitions/ files/ folders, try to make an image of the whole disk (a full sector copy) if possible, just in case your efforts to use recovery software fail. At least then you have a "forensic" copy available.
As far as recovery tools are concerned I believe a program called Testdisk is free and quite successful. At least I think that is it's name, maybe someone else can chip in here while I try to confirm it.

Update :
This is the homepage for Testdisk if you want to try it;
TestDisk - CGSecurity