Solved
ide hard drive failed, shows up in Windows XP as Raw unformatted drive but in DOS I can see all my old files
Posted on 2006-11-03
Hello, I need help. I have a hard drive that I put in an USB external case (the hard drive is really a IDE internal). Earlier this week I tried to copy several Gigs of information from another USB External to this particular drive. During the transfer the drive that I was copying to just powered off. When I powered it back on I reconnected it to my Windows XP PC with the USB cable and it shows up in My Computer but as a Drive that's empty and needs to be formatted. I don't panic, I try several things to get my files back. I have not reformatted the drive at all. I got a Windows 98 boot disk and booted to DOS, when I get in DOS I can see all my folders, files and directories but when Im in Windows it shows up as a Raw drive that needs formatting. I tried to use the XCOPY command in DOS to just copy the files to another drive and then reformat the damaged drive but this version of DOS does not have XCOPY. So I download earlier versions of DOS (6.22, Win 95) that have XCOPY and boot into DOS with those disk, Problem now is when I try to change to the drive letter of my hard drive it says invalid drive. The drive won't show up in any version of DOS earlier than Win 98. The XCOPY in Win XP only works from the C: prompt in windows and when Im in that it doesn't see the hard drive either. I know my files are there cause I can see them in DOS. I just need to know how to get them to another hard drive so I can reformat this hard drive to a working state again. The damaged hard drive is a 200gb seagate IDE. It has about 80gb of very important information to my business.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance.