badstat.blogg.se - Techspot wd drive utilities

The safest approach IMO, is to copy anything you want from the drive to another drive.

There are also instructions for the various utilities which are included in the package. There are instructions for burning an ISO image to CD, or for creating a bootable USB flash drive. This will allow you to boot to a Linux Live system and examine/copy your drive.

If the cleanup procedure does not fix your situation, you will need to try accessing the drive outside of Windows.

Follow this guide to cleaning up USB drivers.

Here are some steps you can try in order of complexity. Clearly, you don’t want to initialize the drive. For some reason, Windows is not seeing the partition.

In a DOS box, entering smartctl -a sda (or sdb, sdc, or the like) will tell you everything you need to know about your hard drive’s SMART status–if you can read the sometimes overlapping information.It is pretty certain that your data is still there. If you love the command line, SMART Monitoring Tools might be for you.

Several capable utilities allow you to view the information. Unfortunately, although many BIOSs will relay the basic “Hey, I’m okay (or not)” information to you when you boot the PC, Windows 7 doesn’t provide a way to access the details. Today’s hard drives have a self-analysis feature that keeps tabs on the drive’s health. SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) My other favorite freebie is Easeus Partition Manager Home: It’s professional in appearance and has all the features I generally need.

Offering an extremely small footprint and very quick boots, Partition Logic seems to work fine, at least with internal IDE drives. You need to visit the command prompt twice during the boot process, but I have on occasion found that GParted Live boots when the Parted Magic disc will not–and vice versa. If you don’t need memory testing, or if you just want an alternative Linux partitioning boot disc, GParted Live is a slightly lighter-weight boot disc that also supports booting from a USB flash drive or an external hard drive.