Computer Hope
Hardware => Hardware => Topic started by: Mayhem on April 10, 2008, 10:26:14 PM
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When I turn on my Lacie external hard drive (160GB, USB2) Windows Vista Home Premium tells me I can't use the drive until I format it. I've been using the drive for years and it has over 120GB of data on it. Needless to say, I don't want to lose this data. Can anyone recommend me a good (and preferably free) recovery program so I can still recover the files from that hard drive?
Thank you.
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What's the file format of the external drive? NTFS? FAT32?
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It was FAT32 but I converted it to NTFS about half a year ago. It has always worked without problems up til now. Sorry, I forgot to mention that.
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How is it being reported in Disk Management ? ?
Right clik My Computer and select manage...then disk management.
You may want to re-boot first.
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I can't tell right now, it's busy analysing the drive so I can't access it now.
Rebooting didn't help, that was one of the first things I tried. I'm fairly positive the MFT is messed up, so I'm looking for a reliable program to recover my data from the drive.
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I'm trying Disk Recovery Wizard, something I found here (http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/hard_drive_recovery_software/), but it's been scanning my drive for over 27 hours now and has barely reached 2% of the progress bar. Is it supposed to take this long on external hard drives (USB2) or is this program useless? The drive has a lot of activity going on, so I assume the program is doing something. But at this rate, finding the files on the drive will take weeks and recovering them might take even longer! :(
On top of that, I'm not even sure if this program is any good. I don't know if it'll be able to recover my data...
So who can suggest a good data recovery program, in case this one turns out to be a waste of time?