Windows 7: 2 TB sata external HD usb broke off

injmalk: I'm not familiar with PartWiz.... yet, so John (ICit2lol) is going to have to answer your inquiries. Searching is fine, just don't "commit" anything unless someone says to do that. It's a big drive so it will take some time to search. Sorry, wish I knew the answer.

So I searched and all they found was a 128 mb partition? any advice?

Unallocated and empty. I have a 2 GB that shows the same amount of available space (due to the whole decimal vs binary thing). The drive needs to be set up first before it can be used,

Partition or Volume - Create New

Before doing that was there anything on it before? If so you may want to try something like this first,

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download

and see if you can recover what was there.

Yeah, I wasn't concerned by the overhead or the decimal/binary thing.

But I should have asked
"Was there data on the disk?"
And followed up with "Data you need to recover?"

Thanks Stormy.

yes there was data on the disc.. I searched for the partition using partwiz but they only found a 128 partition.. ill try finding the data using recuva and let you guys know how it goes

so recuva is asking me where to search for the files and since there is no partition on my HD there is nothing I can pick to search.

You might try this tutorial: Regain a lost drive using Test Disk - An Illustrated Guide

I have never used the tutorial or the Testdisk utility. In searching for other solutions, Testdisk often comes up and is well regarded. I spoke with the author of the tutorial about a week ago, and he retested the stable version on both a 32 bit and 64 bit machine, so you can ignore the 64 bit WOW strikeout on the Testdisk page.

Just make sure you download the stable 6.13 version, not the beta 6.14 version

When you get to
12.Ninth window: Confirm write partition table by pressing Y
Make sure that the information presented is what you expect it to be, the tutorial images show jumanji's drive so the numbers/size will be different.

Looking back at the Disk Mgmnt screenshot, I would expect you to see 1862.89Gb or 1.8Tb. As I mentioned I haven't run this tool, I'm not sure how the utility will present the drive, it might say 2Tb. If you want to post a screenshot when you get to that point, please do.

Thanks for the heads up about testdisk. It seems like a powerful tool however I did not seem to have luck with it. The tutourial was outdated and was asking me to pick options that werent there like analyze and from there everything was different. The testdisk version now tried recovering lost files. All it recovered was 350 gb of .java and .xml,.png, ect. The only files that were anything seemed like the WD files that come with the drive. Any suggestions on what I should do next?

Please post a current Device Manager screen shot.

Hmmm, I just ran Testdisk and the tutorial tracked the program step-by-step.

It sounds as though you might have launched photorec_win since you mention the recovered files. Testdisk works on the geometry level of the disk, not the file system level.

Try Testdisk again, making sure that you right click Testdisk_win and run as administrator. Please select Create (new log) instead of No Log in step 4.

Please post a screen shot of each step - Alt+Prtsc will capture the active window, open paint, paste the capture, save, then attach the captured window image to your post on SF (paper clip on post menu)

I guess I should also ask: You downloaded Testdisk 6.13, correct?

No probs Bill I am no expert as you know and am always willing to let you take anything on board as it is a learning curve for me too

Just as a matter of interest I just did a PW on my back up data drive > right click on the drive > explore > it then shows up as in the pics > click on the crosses and it opens those out as per noraml. Whether this will do it in an unallocated disk..... Worth a try