Recovering An Unallocated Partition

[marz0o]

Hey guys,

I have a 250GB Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini that is showing up as unallocated partition in Disk management on Windows 7. It is a family member's hard drive and they told me that they had filled up the hard drive as much as they could and when we tried to access it recently it wouldn't be read. I have tried several partition recovery tools such as EaseUS recovery and Active Recovery but I can't get the space to be recovered. Whenever I open up disk management, it asks me to initialize the disk to MBT or GPT before I can use it and I'm not sure if I should choose and option in fear it will format the drive. Any ideas on how I can recover the allocated partition? Below are some images of what I'm seeing.

 

[ronintexas]

Is this the same problems that were happening on their computer?

 

[marz0o]

Is this the same problems that were happening on their computer?

Yes. They had installed the Maxtor harddrive program on their Windows 7 laptop but it wasn't being read in that program either.

 

[ronintexas]

Usually when this happens, there is one of two issues - one is the USB to SATA circuit board in the external enclosure that is bad, the second is the hard drive itself is bad. When hooked up to multiple computers, and the result is the same (failed to read the drive) - one of the two is bad.

I can almost guarantee that if you try to initialize the disk, it will fail (doing this will erase the contents of the drive).

The best possible scenario is to find an exact make/model of the external drive, and swap out the drives (hoping it is a bad USB to SATA converter). In that scenario, you can recover the data. Most data recovery shops will be able to do this, however, they do charge quite a bit.

 

[marz0o]

Usually when this happens, there is one of two issues - one is the USB to SATA circuit board in the external enclosure that is bad, the second is the hard drive itself is bad. When hooked up to multiple computers, and the result is the same (failed to read the drive) - one of the two is bad.

I can almost guarantee that if you try to initialize the disk, it will fail (doing this will erase the contents of the drive).

The best possible scenario is to find an exact make/model of the external drive, and swap out the drives (hoping it is a bad USB to SATA converter). In that scenario, you can recover the data. Most data recovery shops will be able to do this, however, they do charge quite a bit.

I did think at first it was a bad USB to SATA converter because within the hard drive enclosure, I'd hear some beeping. So I opened up the enclosure, disconnected the hard drive and placed it in an external hard drive reader and that's how I got the results in the original post. The hard drive wasn't being read within the enclosure. So would that be both a usb/sata problem and a hard drive problem?

 

[ronintexas]

If the drive was a retail external drive enclosure (both the hard drive and enclosure sold in the same "box"), the USB to SATA converter is unique to that drive (you can take the drive and repartition and format it in another enclosure, but you often won't be able to read it). They use a proprietary interface that was designed specifically for that drive.

The external drive reader you have probably uses a "universal" interface (made for maximum compatibility). I will never purchase a retail boxed external drive because of that reason.

 

[fzabkar]

Can you show us the content of the Partitions window in DMDE (freeware disc editor)?

http://dmde.com/

Was the drive spinning up inside the enclocure? Beeping often occurs if the USB port cannot provide sufficient power to spin up the drive, in which case a USB Y-cable sometimes works.

 

[PhilipBooth]

It is a very critical problem, and I faced this problem. Therefor I will suggest, you have to hire any data recovery expert.