a 20 Gig Master C: and a 20 Gig Slave H:. The Slave drive (where I recently copied a lot of files as the Master was getting full) has today shown up as being unformatted? I've not done any formatting/partitioning of either drive, I've just been happily computing without too many problems. But why is it that all of a suddden I can't read the disk and it says that there's no valid file system? I have a removable hard disk for my master drives - one with Win XP Home and Another with Kubuntu Linux. But Kubuntu doesn't see the slave drive either.Any Advice Greatly received - The Slave drive has/had lots of stuff I really don't want to lose - but I know it might already be lost
there is alot of free software on the net that will scan your hard drive amd will try to find it, its happened to me before but unluckly for me all my data was lost. but first try looking on google for data recovery
I did look for data recovery software and I found a couple that I thought might work. I tried "PC Inspector File Recovery" and it's not been any help, as it still sees the drive as unformatted and cannot see any information on it, but it might be useful for undeleting some files on my C: that I copied across to the other drive, if only I could remember all of them -fat chance of that! If anybody can recommend a specific piece of software (OpenSource - or Freeware preferred!) I'd be most grateful! Thanks for your helpful advice hdfk
If you didn't defrag, the PC Inspector may help some. If you did, then you're SOL from what I've seen. I'd also suggest checking for spyware and viruses too. Lastly, you may want to get ahold of some diagnostic software from the hard drive manufacturer and see if the drive happens to have gone bad.
Spy ware and antivirus checks done all the time as a matter of routine, nothing to show for those! I've found a prog called Active @ Undelete which seems to have found something on the disk... I've run several scans with it but don't quite understand exactly what I'm supposed to be doing.. One of the scans took more than 12 hours. I'm fairly sure I'll be able to get something back. It's just a case of trying. Oh! and buying the software