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Ok, so i bought a 300GB HDD from OcUK a few months back, along with an IcyBox USB2/Firewire enclosure. I use it as a media drive, so it contains all my music and videos and photographs etc. Every computer I've connected it to, even though running Windows XP, hasn't automatically shown it as a hard drive in My Computer. So I've always had to go into Disk Management (Via Control Panel / Computer Management / Disk Management) and find the drive. On one computer I had to just once click and make the drive 'online', on another I had to make it into a 'dynamic' drive every time I started the computer. But then this latest time, on yet another computer, the only available option was to convert it from whatever it was to a 'Basic' drive. Not really knowing if that was what i'd clicked the previous times, I went ahead and clicked it. Bad idea, i think.
It then showed up as one big empty hard drive, unpartitioned, even though I'm fully aware I had about 2/3rds of it used with media and stuff. I tried to create a partition (without formatting) to see if it would then be able to find the files, no luck. I ran a few different data recovery programs on it, all to no avail. I even tried to 'undelete' a partition to see if that would find anything, but it didn't. It's now in a computer tech lab and they've said they can't even access it, and are going to have to format it completely, and THEN try and recover some of the data, but still it's not looking promising.
Has anyone ever had any experience with basic/dynamic drives or with converting from one to the other and then losing all access to the drive? Or was there possibly something inherrantly wrong with the drive to begin with that would stop it from showing up in Windows?
It then showed up as one big empty hard drive, unpartitioned, even though I'm fully aware I had about 2/3rds of it used with media and stuff. I tried to create a partition (without formatting) to see if it would then be able to find the files, no luck. I ran a few different data recovery programs on it, all to no avail. I even tried to 'undelete' a partition to see if that would find anything, but it didn't. It's now in a computer tech lab and they've said they can't even access it, and are going to have to format it completely, and THEN try and recover some of the data, but still it's not looking promising.
Has anyone ever had any experience with basic/dynamic drives or with converting from one to the other and then losing all access to the drive? Or was there possibly something inherrantly wrong with the drive to begin with that would stop it from showing up in Windows?
