Can not see external drive in my computer

[DebW5]

Hello,
Will a quick format cause a loss of all personal data?

 

[penguintech]

yes

 

[DebW5]

No, I don't want to do that, thx. I can see the hard drive in Disk Mgt, can select Properties on Disk 1 (which is the external hard drive I'm trying to retrieve files from). What can I do to see it in My Computer? thanks.

 

[aford10]

Are there any conflicts in the device manager?

 

[DebW5]

No, there aren't any conflicts in the device manager.

 

[ryandsouza]

Is the disk assigned a drive letter??
disks without drive letters won't show up in my computer....

 

[mary221]

"Will a quick format cause a loss of all personal data? " You cannot acces your data using a shell.
However the data can be TOTALLY recovered. The some as full format or quick format is not destroying all data on hard disk, but basically only marks the file system as empty, the data exists physically on the hard disk. In order to cayse a loss of all data you need to use a Wipe software, that is over-write all disk surface ( may take hours - not minutes as formatting)

May I ask:
1) In Disk manager there are one or several partitions?
2) what type of file system are these partitions? FAT, NTFS? other? If is displayed ( "healty ( unkown) " than you might have a corrupt partition or a linux/mac partition
3) What operating system do you use? XP? Win 7? Vista?