windows 7 - External hard drive not recognized in OS

07
2014-04
  • MisterUser

    my Hitashi external hard drive is not being recognized by any OS. On windows when i go to "disk managment" section, i have the partition as "NON INITIALISED/ NON ALLOCATED". no other operation on that partion is possible

    Any ideas please?

    EDIT (Copied from a comment from OP)

    in fact, at the begenning, windows invite me to initialise it but when i clik ok, it says ERROR, cyclyc redondance..

    • Answers
  • pabouk

    From the information you added (very important) I guess Windows showed you Data error (cyclic redundancy check). message as on this screenshot: enter image description here

    In such case with a highest probability your hard disk is failing. Install some S.M.A.R.T. tools. For example SpeedFan or other. There check the health of your disk and possibly run internal test or surface check.

    Cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is an error-detecting code. If data are read with errors from the drive then CRC will detect the errors.

  • week

    You need to Initialize HDD before first use or if it's wiped clean. In Windows Disk Management, right click on name of that disk and select Initialize Disk, then follow Wizard.

  • Ash

    I think you can use DISKPART to initialize a hard disk.

    Open up the Start Menu and type “diskpart” in the run box. Press enter. You’ll be prompted by the Windows UAC to authorize admin access to the DISKPART tool.

    A command-prompt-like window will open up, only the prompt will say “DISKPART”. At that prompt, type “list disk”.

    enter image description here

    In the list output on our machine you can see the computer’s hard drive (119GB) and the removable SD card (14GB). It is absolutely critical you note the proper disk number. DISKPART commands are immediate and without any warning. If you type in the wrong disk number, you’re going to have a really bad time.

    After identifying your HDD’s disk number, enter the following command “select disk #” where # is the disk number of your HDD.

    enter image description here

    Whatever commands you execute after this point will only make changes to the selected disk; now would be a good time to double check you’ve selected the right disk just to be extra safe.

    Next, now enter the command “clean”

    enter image description here

    The clean command zeroes out the sectors of the disk that contain the partition data.

    After cleaning the disk, enter the following command “create partition primary”

    enter image description here

    Type format quick fs=ntfs, press Enter

    Type assign, press Enter

    Now type exit, to exit from DISKPART.

    enter image description here


    • Related Question

    External hard drive no longer recognized as NTFS
  • Kevin Hakanson

    I'm running Vista 64 with all the latest updates, and am having trouble accessing my external Seagate FreeAgent XTreme 1.5TB drive. It shows up in the provided Seagate Manager software, and in Windows Explorer, but I can't get to the files any more. When I try and run check chkdsk, I get this:

    c:\>chkdsk k:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Unable to determine volume version and state.  CHKDSK aborted.

    In Seagate Manager, I went to Settings and ran Test My Drive, which succedded. However, before I could do this, I did have to change the connection from eSata to USB (per the Seagate help). Under, Drive Info, the volume name is random unicode characters.

    Using the PC-Doctor Hardware Diagnostic Tools that came with the PC, I ran the test (random seek, funnel seek, surface scan) under Storage Devices for the drive and it passed.

    When I run Computer Management and look at Storage\Disk Management, the K: drive is listed as file system RAW, and not NTFS.

    I have been looking for some recovery software, but they all seem to scan for and find files, but they don't have the acutal filenames (probably for the same reason the drive can't be seen)

    I should note, I have a lemon PC that will often lock up and require a hard power down (check out this almost 300 page thread of the HP Support Forum: HP Elite e9150t Feezes/Locks up.) My guess is that the external drive didn't dismount clean and something is messed up.

    I'm looking for help or pointers to any software that can fix the NTFS data.


    • Related Answers
  • quack quixote

    I've had good results with GetDataBack. It claims to support scenarios like yours, but honestly I've never needed it for that. It's not cheap ($80), but does provide a trial version that you can use to see how well it will recover your files.

    Note that depending on the state of the drive, any file recovery software may have trouble recovering filenames. This is just because of how the filesystem works and what damage (if any) it may have sustained.

  • Marcin

    I had a situation similar to this happen to me. A drive with 200GB+ of stuff from college, including videos we recorded while there suddenly started showing up as RAW and not NTFS which it really was. This was horrible as 80% of the stuff on there was not backed up anywhere (thankfully I learned my lesson and now back everything up).

    I tried a lot of the paid solutions out there to get the data back and amazingly the thing that finally worked is free. The name of the software is Recuva. When you run it make sure you do a deep scan. All the other solutions I tried (including GetDataBack which I saw suggested by ~quack) failed but Recuva got everything back. Some of the video files were 20GB+ each so it was amazing that there was no corruption across such a wide span of data. Give it a try and good luck, I hope it works for you.

    Oh, and yes, it gave me filenames for the files also. It's possible your NTFS index is corrupted but it might still be able to pull in whatever is still there. For me, pretty much everything came with it's original filename even though windows kept telling me that the drive needs to be formatted and kept flagging it as RAW.