Uncreative Labs

Guest

I have a situation in where a drive is failing and I need to recover some data from the drive. The Drive is a 20GB ATA Maxtor and I went to add it to a system that already has a working "master". The failing drive is a slave. I can get the computer's BIOS to see the Hard Drive but in Windows XP there is no drive letter assigned to the drive. I can go into Computer Management and look under disk management and see the failing drive. Its named LOCALDISK (Disk 1) but no drive letter and disk management will not allow me to set a drive letter.

How can I assign a drive letter so that I can see the data on the drive?

Guest

Update:

The drive has Norton Goback installed. From what I can tell it has something do to with that. One site on the internet has the answer to the problem but they want me to commit to a $9.95 USD per month subscription to their service. The site is called Experts Exchange. I would rather not do anything like that. Any help would be appreciated.

Guest

if you can access the files.
go to www.ztree.com and d/l ztree 1.49 ( earler versions will not work with xp.)
use it in trial mode ( 30 days) to copy or move files to another drive.
windows explorer is clunky, you slightly gray hair will be white before the files are copied/moved

you can tag (t) and alt-copy or move to another drive, duplicating the same directories.

don't bother program files, just data.
BUT if something prevents yopu from accessing the files
like lack of a drive letter ( very strange) I am interested in finding out the how and why.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 377 Location: Stuttgart, Germany

Don't run the LDM ( Local Disk Manager ) on that drive. That tool wasn't designed for data recovery. Most likely if anything, it will just overwrite your data when you try to bring the drive back to life with the ldm.
I had a lot of luck with a program called R-Studio 2.0. It scans the physical drive ( doesn't fool around with the drive letters ) for all kinds of partitions ( primary, logicla, fat, fat32, ntfs, ext3 etc ) and then gets a list of files. Then you can chosse which files to recover. However, the trial can only recover files up to 64kb. The full version costs money, but it's worth getting it. Use the trial to scan your drive. then save the scan inofmration in a file on your master drive, buy R-Studio if it found the right files on the broken drive, install R-Studio, load that scan information file created by the trial and recover your data. That program has already helped me with a lot of drives. I got the same good results with Ontrack EasyRecovery and Phoenix Stellar NTFS. That stellar thing looks a lot like R-Studio but costs money as well.

Guest

Thanks mf_2

I just downloaded RStudio and find it quite adequate for my task. I found a serial number on a serialz site in which I can now have full access to the program without paying a dime!

This should be great. Thanks again.