Windows 7 - Hard Drive shows in device manager, not My Computer

I've spent most of the night searching and cannot seem to find an answer to my problem so I registered with the hopes that someone here may be able to help.

I have a NAS set up with two 2TB Samsung Spinpoint hard drives. The hard drives in the NAS were partitioned to have 300GB in a RAID 1 and the remainder in a RAID 0. One seemed to be failing so I removed it hoping I could connect it externally to my laptop and recover the data. When I hooked it up to the laptop, it seemed to connect fine but did not show in My Computer. When I went to Computer Management - Disk Management, it shows the partitions as healthy (see image - Disk 1). However, when I right click on the partitions to assign a drive letter, the only options available are Delete Volume and Help. Same when right clicking the Disk 1, all that is available is Convert to Dynamic Disk, Properties, and Help.





Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Did you try accesing the drivers from device manager ? (right click 'open')

It won't allow you to assign drive letters because (if you look closely) it doesn't understand the file system. Assuming that NAS is running some sort of Linux or BSD OS, you're probably looking at some variant of EXT2 or EXT3. Windows can't assign a drive letter and access a filesystem it doesn't understand (either natively or with a filter driver), and I would guess it is marking them healthy simply because they appear to have valid partition offsets - I wouldn't trust it to be accurate about health of those partitions for sure until it can understand the filesystem.

Cluberti's on the money - the file system is in all likelyhood EXT3. If you had a PC with a Linux distro, you could attach the hard drive to that, then access the data that way.

Regards,
Golden

Thanks for the quick responses. I know that the data I want to retrieve is on the 300GB and 1500GB partitions. Assuming the Linux OS was added to either of the other two partitions, could I simply delete those two volumes and try to reattach the drive? Or would the drive still be recognized as an EXT2/3 format?

If you're trying to save data, I wouldn't touch them at all and would instead suggest data recovery options - also, if any of the volumes was RAID0, you should expect partial data recovery at best, and potentially a total loss at worst.

You might be best using a tiny Linux distro like Puppy Linux which can boot from DVD or a pen drive.Puppy Linux Community - Home

And File Recovery the Lucid Puppy way here Lucid Puppy way to recover files from a non-bootable computer .

With Raid 0 you have zero fault tolerance, raid 0 is used for speed but the price one pays is the total loss of data if one drive in a raid 0 goes bad. Raid 0 writes data across multiple drives at the same time in blocks, this means that the data that is being written is broke up into blocks like 32K or 64K block size and spread out across the raid 0 array, if one drive goes bad all data is lost as the files can not be reconstructed because part of the data is missing.

I think mgp is right. I think it is RAID 1 that is mirroring.