EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE: No System Files

Greetings, W7F Community. When I started moving files from one external drive to another, the SOURCE DRIVE suddenly became non-existent. That is, it disappeared and Windows said that it "no longer exists." The TARGET DRIVE was just added a week ago, bringing my number of external drives to 3. Part of the reason for the transfer was that with the installation of the new drive, the SOURCE DRIVE had changed it's drive letter on it's own. I have tried to reach the drive using Windows Disk Management, R-Studio 5.4.1 and Hiren's Boot CD 15 on a Linux USB Pendrive. The programs on the Boot CD yield the same results as the screen shots I have included. The Boot CD has some programs I have not tried, because they are run from the Linux Command Line and I have no real experience with Linux, and I'm afraid of making things worse (if that's humanly possible). I have recovered files from drives with lost partitions and have restored partitions in the past. But this disk does not even register as "raw". Is it at all possible to access the disk (my data), or has this drive become nothing more than a paperweight? Please help...

Hi, Roy. I haven't tried the drive on another computer, and I won't be able to do that immediately. As to the BIOS and the Caddy, now you're going beyond me. I have no real technical background in computer systems.

In that second pic above it asks you to initialize the disk. Did you do that? If you did not: DON'T.

Hi, TVeblen. I did try the Initialize Disk, as a last effort to gain some kind of access. Even though this procedure is to ready the disk for repartitioning and drive association, it does give you the option to cancel. I was told "The Disk Is Not Ready." ... By they way, cool avatar.

Disk initialization performs a type of quick format. If you did that you now need to focus on recovering files. Once you have (hopefully) recovered them, then you can work on restoring the drive functionality.

You can use the free program RECUVA, or any other, like EaseUS, to try and recover files from a formatted disk.

To increase the likelihood that recovery will go well you should not do anything else with the drive until that job is done.

If you did not initialize the drive you might recover it simply by giving it a drive letter manually. This kind of problem is common when using multiple removable drives.

This page here:
My External Hard Drive is not recognized by my computer | External Drives FAQ
Gives a good step by step.

Another tip: shut off the computer. Disconnect all external drives. Start up and then connect the drives one at a time. This may sort out the drive letter conflict.

The drive is as you see it from the moment it was lost. It was never re-formatted. There is absolutely no access to the "raw" drive. That's why I hit INITIALIZE, just to see if it would access the drive in order to reformat it. If the initialization command had gone through, I simply would have hit cancel. But I'll give Recuva a try.