Can't access partition on my external HD

[rupertvdb]

Hi there,

I'm having trouble accessing data on my external hard disk and I was hoping someone might be able to help me.

To explain, something terrible (my flatmate) happened to my laptop causing it to fry its motherboard. The laptop itself was beyond economic repair but the hard disk containing all of its data survived. I went out and bought one of those shells you can get which turns it into an external hard disk which works, i.e. I can view some of its data, but I can't see it all. The disk was partitioned into a C and D drive and it looks like the only data that is showing up on the disk is what was on the C drive.

Does anyone know what is going on and how I can get over the problem? The D drive is where I stored all of my precious data i.e. photos, music etc and I would like to get at it.

 

[elel]

Um, I'm not the most qualified to answer this post, but just so you have something, here goes. As to why only some of your disk is now visible I can only speculate but a guess might be that the high currents and electrical transients from the shorting board caused magnetic fields that messed up parts of the disk. It also might be that your 'new' computer, I.E. the one that you are now using, does not know that there are supposed to be two partitions on the drive and so it does not find the second one. I have not used any of these disk recovery programs myself, but a quick search on Sourceforge.net brought up Dr. Freeware, which looks good (drfreewar.org), or another solution might be the System Rescue CD linux distro (sysresccd.org). If the problem is just that your computer does not detect the second partition, there is probably a much easier way to do this, but I do not know it. Hope this helps!

 

[rupertvdb]

Um, I'm not the most qualified to answer this post, but just so you have something, here goes. As to why only some of your disk is now visible I can only speculate but a guess might be that the high currents and electrical transients from the shorting board caused magnetic fields that messed up parts of the disk. It also might be that your 'new' computer, I.E. the one that you are now using, does not know that there are supposed to be two partitions on the drive and so it does not find the second one. I have not used any of these disk recovery programs myself, but a quick search on Sourceforge.net brought up Dr. Freeware, which looks good (drfreewar.org), or another solution might be the System Rescue CD linux distro (sysresccd.org). If the problem is just that your computer does not detect the second partition, there is probably a much easier way to do this, but I do not know it. Hope this helps!

thanks a lot! Don't know quite what the problem was but fiddling around with that freeware has done something because I can now access the drive. Huzzah.