Hard Drive Visible in Device Manager but Not Explorer

[Jakash]

Hello everyone,
I have a Seagate NAS drive that suddenly stopped being attached to the network. I changed cables, tried plugging it into other networks, straight into several different computers and nothing worked.

So I removed the harddrive from the case and plugged it into a hard drive enclosure. When I connect the drive to a computer explorer can't see it. But it appears in device manager and I can see it via cmd prompt.

Is there a way to get it to work or more importantly get the data off?

 

[Solandri]

Try giving the drive a letter in Disk Management (Computer/My PC -> Manage -> Disk Management). If the disk is formatted in a way Windows recognizes, you'll have the option to give it a drive letter.

Unfortunately for you, most NASes run Linux under the hood and use ext2 or ext3 - a Linux partition format. Windows does not recognize these natively, and it will show up as an unknown partition type or unformatted in Disk management. You will have to try a Linux boot CD to access the data on the drive, or use one of these methods to allow Windows to read Linux partitions.

http://www.howtogeek.com/112888/3-ways-to-access-your-linux-partitions-from-windows/

There's also a small possibility that Seagate used a non-standard partition type in their NAS. In that case, you have an even longer road ahead to retrieving your data. (Usually this is only done on DVR disks to discourage people from violating copyright by getting at the raw video data. But it's not unheard of for it to be done in other proprietary devices. Usually though it's just a different partition type ID for an ext2 or ext3 partition.)

 

[Jakash]

Try giving the drive a letter in Disk Management (Computer/My PC -> Manage -> Disk Management). If the disk is formatted in a way Windows recognizes, you'll have the option to give it a drive letter.

Unfortunately for you, most NASes run Linux under the hood and use ext2 or ext3 - a Linux partition format. Windows does not recognize these natively, and it will show up as an unknown partition type or unformatted in Disk management. You will have to try a Linux boot CD to access the data on the drive, or use one of these methods to allow Windows to read Linux partitions.

http://www.howtogeek.com/112888/3-ways-to-access-your-linux-partitions-from-windows/

There's also a small possibility that Seagate used a non-standard partition type in their NAS. In that case, you have an even longer road ahead to retrieving your data. (Usually this is only done on DVR disks to discourage people from violating copyright by getting at the raw video data. But it's not unheard of for it to be done in other proprietary devices. Usually though it's just a different partition type ID for an ext2 or ext3 partition.)

Thanks for the reply.

I tried giving it a drive letter as instructed, but the option is greyed out. Also, it says "GPT Protected Partition" or something like that.

I tried booting up to Puppy linux but somethings wrong and it won't boot (it worked a few months ago but not now). So I used Ubuntu. I was able to see all the other drives but not the NAS.

What else can I try to recover the data? I really need this data it's got the contents of a project I've been working on for months.

 

[Solandri]

Doing a quick Google search, it does look like Seagate uses ext3 on their NASes, and may use an incorrect partition ID on top of it. Here are some threads by people who've successfully gotten data off of theirs. (Since you didn't give the NAS model, I can't narrow down the year for you.)

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2058632
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1628556
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/546228/recover-data-on-seagate-central-nas-drive/
https://web.archive.org/web/20151020163523/http://scottpannan.com/index.php/tidbits-more/13-seagate-central-nas-data-recovery-using-windows