Unkown

[cyberdot38]

Hello, I have an HP dv6500 laptop with Vista. I've been using a WD external hard drive to store all my information in it. It worked find until yesterday when I turned on my computer and tried to pull it up.After compiling forever, it finally shows up under my computer, but has data bar listed. I've went to device manager, disk drive, it shows up under disk drives and USB devices.but has no letter allocation.I don't know how to allocate. Plus, in device management the drive show up as (F) 148.05 GB healthy, RAW. I don't want to lose any information. I have published manuscripts on this drive.

Can someone help me?

 

[gtvr]

I'm not sure what you mean by "data bar" - but if it's showing up as RAW then you have a problem with the data/formatting on the drive. The good news is the computer physically sees it. I would look into data recovery software or services - don't try to reformat it.

 

[Paperdoc]

Search the web for instructions on how to recover data and restore a Partition that has a RAW format. I have not done it, but I've seen several posts here by people who have.

As gvtr said, DO NOT FORMAT.