Why wont my laptop recognise my fat32 samsung hard drive

[harvey1611]

Hello,
why wont my laptop recognise my fat32 samsung hard drive ive been try all night and it doesnt seem to work but it works on my ps3

 

[enforcer22]

No idea.... i would say to little info but there is no info....

 

[WesleyTack]

I have the same issue. I'll elaborate with some more details though.

My friends laptop suddenly stopped working. Whenever he boots it up it gets stuck on the windows logo (probably the boot.ini that got screwed up somehow?). He needs a lot of vital data that is on the drive. So it's definitely not broke or damaged in any way. It was working, he rebooted because some "illegal" program told him to reboot and that most likely did the trick. And it also told him to do some edits in the regedit before rebooting.

After this I got involved and my best guess was to pull out the hard drive from the laptop, connect it with an adapter to my home computer. This all works fine. The only issue I have is that it doesn't want me to explore the hard drive in windows explorer. Whenever I select the drive it says I need to format the disk to use it. All my hard drives are ntfs and that one (also a samsung as the OP) is FAT. Maybe this is the issue. I tried making it "active" in the disk management options in my windows, but alas. It's his OS hard drive which was running windows 7 (which is also what I'm using).

I got access to his hard drive with a program from Kroll OnTrack (http://www.krollontrack.com/data-recovery/recovery-software/). But this program only works for removed files on the drive (in his recycling bin). So the disk definitely still has data on it and still works.

My question would be is it possible to use any other program like this to access the drive and copy over the data? Or is there any other way possible to get the old data back? Perhaps even by installing it back into his laptop and do something there to make it boot back up? What I wanted to do was simply: copy the data, put it back in his laptop and re-install windows. Or perhaps I can install windows on it without formatting it? Would this keep his old desktop folder with all data on it?

Any help at all would be highly appreciated! Thanks in advance,
- Wesley

 

[popatim]

can you run a virus scan on it? Often once you identify the virus you can find a removal tool that will get you the drive back. otherwise there are plenty of free recovery tools on the net that are quite excellent.

 

[WesleyTack]

I don't think it is a virus. Like I said my friend broke the windows boot I'm pretty sure unwillingly. What we need to be able and do is browse the disk from a different computer and copy the data he wants back from it so we can format it and re-install windows. What tools are you recommending? I tried finding some but so far either the tools also can't work on the disk or as mentioned in my previous post the other tool I used only recovered already removed data from his garbage bin (which is not the data he needs).

Thanks
- Wesley