Add a filled hard drive to a pc without loosing data

[Louis-David Robillard]

I bought an external hard drive (Clickfree HD2037N3) few years ago and it fails recently. After some goofing around, i realise that the enclosure itself failed and make it impossible to use, so a disembled it. I find myself with a 2TB hard drive (Samsung 3.5") and plugged it in my system. I cant see it in the system explorer but it is in the disk manager. I see a 1863.02 Go drive not allocated. When a try to allocate space to this drive, i'm asked to format it. But i don't want to loose the data on it.

Is there any way i can use this drive without loosing all the data on it (nearly 1.2To used)?

PS: I'm on windows 7, already 3 drive in the system (2 SSD (120Go + 360Go), 1 HDD (500Go))

 

[Dogsnake]

Try this. In disk management, right click on the drive and it will offer some choices. You want to activate the drive to make it active in the system.

 

[Louis-David Robillard]

Try this. In disk management, right click on the drive and it will offer some choices. You want to activate the drive to make it active in the system.

I don't have the option. if i right click on the disk itself, i see [Convert to a dynamic disk, Convert to a GPT disk, Properties, Help]

I've look thru properties windows and i didn't see anything that look like "Activate this disk" or something like that.

 

[Dogsnake]

When you have the Disk Management window open; look at the bottom half of the window where the discs are listed not by drive letter but as "disc 0", "disc 1" and so on. Do you see the disc there? If you do right click it and be sure it has a drive letter assigned and that the "online" option is active. If it says off line change it to online. These are not part of the disc options tab. Get back with what you find pls.

 

[hang-the-9]

This sounds like more than just the enclosure not working if it's telling you to format it. Windows is not seeing a partition on the drive and therefore not assigning it a drive letter. The fact that you don't see that option in Disk Manager also shows this.

Try running TeskDesk to recover the partition info, and I also suggest running a disk check utility from the drive vendor, eiher a Windows utility if they have it or from a boot disk like Hirens or Ultimate Boot CD. Keep in mind I am not talking about Windows checkdsk which does not do a good job at finding errors on the drive but more the file system.

 

[Louis-David Robillard]

When you have the Disk Management window open; look at the bottom half of the window where the discs are listed not by drive letter but as "disc 0", "disc 1" and so on. Do you see the disc there? If you do right click it and be sure it has a drive letter assigned and that the "online" option is active. If it says off line change it to online. These are not part of the disc options tab. Get back with what you find pls.

I see my disc (Disc 2). Next to it, i see: 1863.02Go Unallocated with a black line on top of it.
Under Disc 2, it says that it is online.

Update:
I tried something. I allocated the lettre K:, make it an active dirve after doin this. Now i see it in the file explorer. But when i try to go in it, Widows error pop up say that i need to format it before using it.
In Disc manager, it see 1863.02 Go RAW

 

[Dogsnake]

It sounds like the format of the disk is not being recognized. Now that is has a drive letter you may be able to see it in the "Computer" window of the start menu. If you can check the drives properties and see what it says next to "File System" in the properties window. I do not understand "Go RAW". Can you view any of the files on the disk even if you can not open them? This device is usually used as a back-up. Is this how you used it? Can you post the names of any of the files you see? If you used it as a backup you may be able to recover the data only with the software that was used to write the backups.

 

[Louis-David Robillard]

It sounds like the format of the disk is not being recognized. Now that is has a drive letter you may be able to see it in the "Computer" window of the start menu. If you can check the drives properties and see what it says next to "File System" in the properties window. I do not understand "Go RAW". Can you view any of the files on the disk even if you can not open them? This device is usually used as a back-up. Is this how you used it? Can you post the names of any of the files you see? If you used it as a backup you may be able to recover the data only with the software that was used to write the backups.

My computer (and myself) langage is set to French, so Go is Gb in english. I didn't realise it at first. My bad.

For the drive, at first it was a Backup/Storage unit. I stopped using as a backup drive, because the software sucked. So it was purely for file storage. Now, i see it in my File explorer, but when i click on it, i can't even reach the file browser page, a error pop-up ask me to format the drive.
For the RAW, i think the drive is not recognized as a NTFS drive, but as a "RAW" one(i didn't even know it exist)

 

[Dogsnake]

Ok; please read through this entire article. 1.(http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_install/win7-sees-partition-as-raw-file-system/fd7549b2-7021-4bfe-9bcf-50d5c09f0a72)and 2. (http://html5.litten.com/updated-how-to-fix-external-disk-drive-suddenly-became-raw/). Now that the drive has a drive letter you can try the method in article 1. or 2. The #2 method is more involved but it is the one developed for just this situation.