>>...and then erased its previous contents...

Did you happen to do this via creating a new partition with Disk Management?

Check to make sure that your logical drives did not get reassigned drive letters - i.e. What you you thought was Y: is now E:

I did not make any partitions with disk management.

E is still there, as is Y and all my other disks.

According to Disk Management, E is now reported as "healthy" but not formatted, with no NTFS or FAT format indicated, 0 contents and 0 used.

Is there a disk recovery or data recovery utility that can pull the data off?

I have used “GetDataBack Data Recovery 2.31” with success – after testing several data recovery applications. (I have also purchased some that did not work!) Take a look at

http://www.runtime.org/

Joran

I'll give them a try. Thanks. Very mysterious.

I just spent three days with an external USB drive that had the same exact message.

1. Do NOT do ANYTHING to the drive until you have recovered files from it. Do not attempt to do anything that will write files or re-format or anything else. You will only make the problem worse.

2. At the end of three days, when I had recovered all my files (see below), I plugged the drive into a different computer. Amazingly, all the files showed up!! I plugged it back into my XP computer, and got the same error message, and no files showed up. In my case the drive was formatted with FAT32, not NTFS, and the computer that it worked with was an old Win98SE computer. I'm not sure why that would make a difference. However, the advice I would give would be, before you do anything else, try the drive attached to as many computers as you can, and see if the files "reappear." If they do, copy them, and then verify by looking at samples of the files, that they have copied correctly.

3. Before I found the simple solution listed in #2, I tried various recovery programs. The only one that worked was EasyRecovery from Ontrack. Very expensive ($200), but also the only one that works. Highly recommended item for your bag of tricks.

I too had the samething happen...all of of sudden my 160gig maxstor drive (when access) gave a "NOT FORMATTED" error. I am on Windows 2000. I used EasyRecovery to get my files and I narrown the problem down to the USB (either the USB port or my actual USB drive case). Taking no more chances, I plugged my Hard Drive directly to the computer via the IDE cables and 3 months later I haven't experienced any problems. I am convinced that it's something in USB and my motherboard, but I don't know what.

So right now, I Don't trust any hard drives connected to my USB ports.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one :)

I took my drive out and connected it directly to the internal IDE cables. In my case, that didn't do it. It required connection to a different computer. I am not sure whether it had something to do with the FAT32 file system that I was using on this drive, which is "foreign" to XP but native to Win98SE, or whether it was something to do with the particular XP service packs that are installed. All I know is that after I recovered the files with EasyRecovery, and before I reformatted the drive, I connected it to my Win98SE computer and all the files were back. I then copied those files and got a perfect recovery (the Ontrack EasyRecovery process got about 99% of the files, but definitely missed some of them).

I also installed a fan in my external enclosure. Don't EVER buy an external drive enclosure that doesn't have a fan (this one was given to me, so I didn't have a choice).

I have also used "Get Data Back" for NTFS from runtime.org. It works very well. There are two versions. One for NTFS files and the other for Fat32. It costs $80.

Jay Mitchell

Hello

I tested EasyRecovery and it was able to recover 4,000 out of approximately 13,000 files. GetDataBack recovered over 12,000 of the files. My problem is 'cyclic redundancy check error'.

Best wishes,
Joran

I had the same thing just happen to me as described by JohnMeyer, My old (win98SE) PC had two external HDD's on it. Two identical ADS 1394 Enclosures - one with a WD and one with a Maxtor. I plugged them into my new WinXP PC, and one drive was recognized completely, the other (the WD) was exactly as you describe sidecar. Didn't matter which 1394 port I used, I even tried removing it from the ADS box and connected directly to the IDE cable as an internal HDD. Still no go - says "drive not formatted".

I ended up transferring everything from the Maxtor HDD that WAS recognized to the new PC internal HDD's, deleting everything off of that drive, hooking it back to the old PC, and transferring everything from the WD HDD to the Maxtor, then to the new PC.

I figured it had something to do with the way I originally set up the two 1394 externals. It's been several years, and I did them several months apart, but in thinking back, it seems I set up the Maxtor a little differently than the WD, I just don't remember the details of how they were different...

I'll soon reformat the WD, as I'm planning on using the externals as backup drives.

Frenchy

The two most common causes of this happening are:

1. Loose Firewire Connection
2. Interupted Power Connection

When working with external enclosures, you should check the connections, often.

Jay Mitchell

Not my disk, so who know what my 'mate' did to it.
Only reason I mention this is I'm trying Disk Scavanger on it, the trial version indicates it can recover everything which I guess isn't a difficult test as probably all that's wrong is the partition has been lost. Thing is Disk Scavanger is pretty cheap, don't know how well it'd perform under stress, wondering if anyone else has tried it and found it seriously lacking before I part with $44 for it.

Bob.

I have had this pop up but I wasn't using any external drives. The drive turned out to be fine just some glitch in windows.

I used Active@FileRecovery and it worked fine as I was able to get most of the data back - there was some curruption. It was not a fast process but it was also a 250gb drive.

>>...I'm trying Disk Scavanger ...

Can you provide a link?

Goggle seemingly didn't lead me to thier site.

Thanks!

oops my bad.
It's called "File Scavenger".
Try www.quetek.com

Again my apologies.

Bob.

Thanks!

OK, I just went through this whole scenario: drive showing up as unformatted, tried to recover data, recovered some, recaptured and re-edited project, replaced drive, started using replaced drive, etc.

Now I'm getting the same exact problem on the replaced drive: it's showing up as unformatted! Boy does this suck. I guess it must be the enclosure.

Well the free "testdisk" utility recovered everything pretty quickly by rewriting whatever was damaged on the disk. That was a lot faster than the "getdataback" approach where I had to copy to another disk, reformat, etc. I found "testdisk" here:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

If the drive was formatted with FAT32, try connecting to a WIn98 or WinME computer, if you still have one. That was the solution to my version of this problem. You can also take the drive out of the external enclosure and hook it up as a slave in your computer. Both these approaches allowed me to see everything exactly as it was and recover everything very quickly.