Win7 adding 2nd sata HD. drive has data on it already

[Larsinaz]

We have an older Dell Dimension PC at work which had a 2tb external hard drive attached to it. Unfortunately, the usb connector on the drive broke. So I took the drive out of it's external case and installed it into the PC. How do I set up this drive so that I can access the data thats on it? In diskmgmt.msc, the drive is listed and is shown as unallocated. Thanks


More info from far left tab in diskmgmt:
Disk 0
unknown
1863.02 GB
Not Initialized

 

[permanoob]

If it's listed as unallocated then that means it has no partition table, thus no direct way to access the data. Now, you can create a new partition and try and run some file recovery software on it and see if you can get anything from it. It's quite possible, just time consuming. It just depends on how much you want the data. Getdataback is a good program. People have success with Recuva as well.

 

[clide005]

That sounds bad. Generally if you have a ntfs file system on a HDD if you plug it into another computer it should just come right back up as a secondary drive. If it is showing up as unallocated you might be hosed. I would try removing it rebooting. Then shutting down and adding it in again a couple of times and see if windows picks up the secondary drive. If not you have a corrupted file system and all you're going to be able to do is use some type of file recovery software to get as much data off the drive as possible.

 

[Larsinaz]

Thanks! I do believe I may be hosed. I removed the HDD, restarted the PC and then reconnected the 'bad' hdd via a sata to usb adapter I have. I can hear the disk power up but windows never recognizes it.

Full Disclosure... I dropped the external drive a few days ago but I thought it still worked after that.