SMART error, no drive letter, how do I back up?

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clarkcoleman

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Jan 14, 2015
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An old IDE drive got a S.M.A.R.T. error message from BIOS during boot-up. Windows 7 starts out with a message recommending that I back up the drive using Windows Backup and Restore. The drive no longer shows up with a drive letter in Windows 7, but Windows 7 obviously knows it is there, hence the message. But when I hook up an external USB and start Windows Backup and Restore, it only shows me the drive letters C: and D:, the good SATA drives, with no drive letter for the old IDE drive. So, how can I back up the drive so that I can restore it onto a new IDE drive I just bought as a replacement?
 
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clarkcoleman

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Jan 14, 2015
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When I run diskmgmt.msc, it pops up a window titled "Initialize Disk" with the bad disk with no drive letter identified as "Disk2." It syas "You must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it." Then it gives me two radio button choices. The default is MBR (Master Boot Record) and the other is GPT (GUID Partition Table). It warns that Note: The GPT partition style is not recognized by all previous versions of Windows. It is recommended for disks larger than 2TB, or disks used on Itanium-based computers."

Given that this is an old IDE drive formatted on a Windows XP system before I upgraded recently to Windows 7, it seems that MBR is the way to go. But now the question is: Will this disk initialization reformat the whole drive or blow away files? That would be counterproductive, to say the least.

Should I first try to turn off SMART in the BIOS temporarily and see if I can access the drive just long enough to back it up, or does this message from Disk Management indicate that Windows is not going to properly read the drive with the MBR initialization step?

Update: This discussion:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/258179-32-initialize-hard-drive-formatting

indicates maybe I need to use a data recovery program, as the "Initialization" step will format the hard disk. In Disk Management, good drives show how much is allocated and unallocated and say "NTFS" next to the size of the drive. For the bad disk, it shows entirely unallocated, and does not say NTFS or RAW. Type is Unknown rather than Basic, status is Not Initialized rather than Online. Basically, no info other than the size. I think I will try a data recovery program next.
 
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