George_Evanson
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IDE drive not assigned drive letter when put in USB 2.0 external case -- XP OS
A friend's Gateway PC died suddenly and she badly needs to recover data for the HD. I put the Quantum 20 GB HD into an external USB enclosure and XP recognized it and loaded drivers for it. However no drive letter was assigned. I went into Disk Management to see if I could assign a drive letter but that option was grayed out. The drive is shown as Active, healthy and having two partitions. The first partition is marked healthy but unknown. I have run both spinrite and partition magic on this drive and it is recognized but I am given no modification options by either software. Both prgrams told me the partition type was hex 44 which I have found out is the result of Goback changing the MBR. I have looked at the drive with FDISK as well. It also sees the drives and the two partitions but does not know what they are.
I went to the Norton's website and tried to find info. There is very little. I tired the norton's removal tool for all their software but it does not see the second hard drive. I am afraid to mess with the goback partition or the MBR for fear I will destroy my friends data. I have researched for hours and I am now at a loss. I am going to take the drive to work and put it into an older Gateway as a slave device but have no idea if that will work. Even if it does its going to take some work to network the old pc to move the data so I would greatly appreciate a way that I could get around the Goback MBR and have the drive identified and assigned a letter so I can just do a normal and sane retrieval of data. All ideas are greatly appreciated.
I went to the Norton's website and tried to find info. There is very little. I tired the norton's removal tool for all their software but it does not see the second hard drive. I am afraid to mess with the goback partition or the MBR for fear I will destroy my friends data. I have researched for hours and I am now at a loss. I am going to take the drive to work and put it into an older Gateway as a slave device but have no idea if that will work. Even if it does its going to take some work to network the old pc to move the data so I would greatly appreciate a way that I could get around the Goback MBR and have the drive identified and assigned a letter so I can just do a normal and sane retrieval of data. All ideas are greatly appreciated.
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Hi George,
Use GetDataBack to recover.
http://www.runtime.org/
A similar case which the Seagte hard drive contents in 2 partitions totally invisible and partition properties shows Invalid Raw Formats and uncheckable by DiskChk.
Seagate Diagnostic able to access but indicated repair needed. Repair done, rebooted but still shows invalid format.
Using GetDataBack successfully shows and recover the files and folders and non destructive as compare to Seagate Diagnostic.
Use GetDataBack to recover.
http://www.runtime.org/
A similar case which the Seagte hard drive contents in 2 partitions totally invisible and partition properties shows Invalid Raw Formats and uncheckable by DiskChk.
Seagate Diagnostic able to access but indicated repair needed. Repair done, rebooted but still shows invalid format.
Using GetDataBack successfully shows and recover the files and folders and non destructive as compare to Seagate Diagnostic.
STOP !! Do not do anything that writes to that drive until you undo the GoBack changes !!
Okay ... now I'll expand a bit.
The simplest way to undo what GoBack did (if you can get this far) is to do this:
(a) Attach the drive to your system as the only drive on the primary IDE channel and try to boot. (Don't worry, you're not really going to boot the system ... which would not work) At this point in the boot process it does NOT matter that your system has a different chipset, CPU, etc. than the original system.
(b) IF you get the GoBack "bar" at the start of the boot process, press the space key (quickly ... before it disappears) and then select "Disable GoBack" from the options. Wait while it does that (this can take anywhere from a few seconds to many minutes) ... and when it tells you it's done (waiting for you to press a key) just turn the system off. The drive will now be easily readable as a slave drive in your system => so just reconnect everything as normal and install the drive in the external case.
The simplest way to undo what GoBack did (if you can get this far) is to do this:
(a) Attach the drive to your system as the only drive on the primary IDE channel and try to boot. (Don't worry, you're not really going to boot the system ... which would not work) At this point in the boot process it does NOT matter that your system has a different chipset, CPU, etc. than the original system.
(b) IF you get the GoBack "bar" at the start of the boot process, press the space key (quickly ... before it disappears) and then select "Disable GoBack" from the options. Wait while it does that (this can take anywhere from a few seconds to many minutes) ... and when it tells you it's done (waiting for you to press a key) just turn the system off. The drive will now be easily readable as a slave drive in your system => so just reconnect everything as normal and install the drive in the external case.
... if that doesn't work, post back => there are other ways to undo GoBack's changes (but that's the easiest and most automatic).
http://knoppix.net
http://ultimatebootcd.com
(includes the HD manufacturer's tools etc).
Sometimes it can also be usefull to install goback on the PC you are using for recovery.