Drive needs formatting?

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10 Nov 2006
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My Dad sees me as some kind of PC guru, and whenever any of his friends have a problem, he has a nasty habit of offering my help. Now I need yours.

His mate had a catastrophic mobo/PS failure, don`t know the details exactly, or the cause, but it failed big time. So he went and bought a complete new PC. Sensibly, he had a backup of all his important stuff on a USB external hard drive. The USB drive was attached to the PC when the mobo/PS failed, but I would not have expected it to affect the drive.

However, when he plugs it into the new PC, windows XP recognises it as a drive, but says that it needs formatting. I suggested that they took the drive out of the USB enclosure, made sure it was set to slave, and attach it directly to a PC, but the same thing happens.

He is bringing the drive for me to have a look at, and wondered if there was anything I can do to access the data, before advising him to go down the expensive data recovery route. I have used some compact flash recovery tools before, with good success. What are my chances with a hard drive?


:)
 
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