External hard drive no partitoin found

oya_oya

January 9, 2011 7:04:11 PM

Hello,

I was in the middle of using my Lacie 500 GB external drive to move data from on pc that had become invested with viruses, in order to totally wipe that drive, when all of a sudden everything froze. I did a hard shutdown and the restarted only to find that all the files on my external were gone. I quickly connected it to another pc (without viruses) and found that although Windows recognized the drive, it showed no data, no partition and asked to reformat the drive. I canceled the reformat but how can I get my files and folders back they were very important to me??

More about : external hard drive partitoin found

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WyomingKnott

Storage Expert

January 9, 2011 8:11:45 PM

Sounds like the virus attacked the drive. There are a few pieces of software out there that will read a drive sector-by-sector and try to rebuild what had been on the disk. All are slow - be prepared for a week or more of running.
Many of them will do a come-on scan and show you filenames or a few K of data for free; then you have to pay for them.

I am not endorsing any of the following options:
http://www.salvagedata.com/recovery-software/
http://www.nucleusdatarecovery.org/
Tom's threads:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/254919-32-external-ha...
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/262874-32-external-ha...

By the way, don't boot that infected machine again! If you need what's on its hard drive, be very careful. I would build a new OS on another machine, then use it to copy the data you need to another drive, than wipe the OS. Then virus-scan the copy you made with two different products. Be very, very careful.

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oya_oya

January 10, 2011 1:16:26 AM

WyomingKnott said:

Sounds like the virus attacked the drive. There are a few pieces of software out there that will read a drive sector-by-sector and try to rebuild what had been on the disk. All are slow - be prepared for a week or more of running.
Many of them will do a come-on scan and show you filenames or a few K of data for free; then you have to pay for them.

I am not endorsing any of the following options:
http://www.salvagedata.com/recovery-software/
http://www.nucleusdatarecovery.org/
Tom's threads:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/254919-32-external-ha...
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/262874-32-external-ha...

By the way, don't boot that infected machine again! If you need what's on its hard drive, be very careful. I would build a new OS on another machine, then use it to copy the data you need to another drive, than wipe the OS. Then virus-scan the copy you made with two different products. Be very, very careful.

WyomingKnot,

Thanks for the suggestions! I will try them out and see what I can do. Since it will take some time (one way or another) it may be a while before I post with updates. But I will be sure to tell you how it turns out and hopefully help the next person in this situation.

As for the infected pc, I'll probably just send it off to be professionaly recovered, so much for -do-it-yourself.

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