Can my data be saved before a format on a hard drive?

Hi Guys
I am no expert, so I really need your expertise on this one.
After purchasing a hard drive (internal) for my external media player from Western Digital, I was unable to find my drive on My Computer.
I went through Disk Management and formatted the drive and Viola!!!
I downloaded a software from Western Digital- Acronis thinking I could make my work easy for me, by transferring my old data from the 500 GB drive to the new 2 TB NAS Hard drive.
After spending a day, getting 100 GB of data to be transferred, I am now back to square one. Cannot access the data on My Computer, No drive, no disk showing up. I see it under Disk Management. I also know the data transferred over, as I connected the player to my TV, and the files showed up.
My concern, is that I need to access it on my PC so that I can make a folder system, for the various data I have.

Is there a way of getting this data, without losing it if I do the format again.
I am under the impression that it has to do with the GPT and MBR when formatting was done, and then changed with using Acronis

Please HELP!

I cloned my entire windows 7 drive using macrium reflex free
Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download

Was easy and it boots fine afterwards.

I am not sure what your trying to do. just copy a data folder to the new drive, but then the drive is no longer visible in explorer? Are you leaving this drive in the PC?

If you have a cloned bootable copy, might be good in case your one drive goes bad, then boot from the other.

Ok, here goes. Thanks for the replies.
My issue is this. My drive I am talking about is not my OS.
I have bought a bigger drive to hold all my photos, movies, music etc.
I have an external Media Player which I connect to the TV and on occasion to my Laptop, where I can play movies and so on.
The Hard Drive is connected into the player, which can be connected the Laptop via USB. When connecting same to TV, it needs a HDMI cable.
After trying to transfer the data from the small drive to the 2 TB size drive, I am now unable to see the Player/with the new drive on my Computer. See picture attached.

So, as u guys can see, I have nothing on my Computer to show me that I have a WD 2 TB drive/media player connected via USB. How do I sync, cos I am unable to make a new folder pair. If there is any other way to find this data, Please let me know, then I will reformat the drive, and do the transfer with the SyncToy, which looks like a cool program :)
Before using the Acronis software to clone the disk, I did see this same drive/media player in My Computer

After trying to transfer the data from the small drive to the 2 TB size drive, I am now unable to see the Player/with the new drive on my Computer. See picture attached.

is the drive still visible in disk management formatted as NTFS while part of the external media player device?

Is the drive not visible in Windows explorer even though formatted as NTFS?
Your trying to view the drive contents while the drive is physically part of the media player device? and connected to the PC by a usb cable?

is the external media player device a box with a hard drive in it used as an external drive with a usb 2.0 interface cable?

Code:

Before using the Acronis software to clone the disk, I did see this same drive/media player in My Computer

You did not clone the whole disk using Acronis, just copied some files and folders?

I am not sure why you need Acronis at all.

Why not just
remove the partition
repartiton
copy the folders using windows explorer
Then it will work in explorer.

SDowney. The first part of your understanding is correct. All yes to those questions.
Here's the hard part :) My husband saved some movies onto the new drive, which we have no copy of. And that is correct about copying only some files and folders.
I am afraid that when I repartition, I may lose all the contents of that drive.
and due to the size of the old drive, which consists of nearly 500 GB of data, and I might add, that every time u need to access these drives, one needs to be removed and replaced with the other, so we tried saving some files/folders onto a small USB drive, and transferred in this fashion.
As I said, I am not an expert on computers, LOL. So that was why I thought Acronis could do the job

I am afraid that when I repartition, I may lose all the contents of that drive

Yes you will if you do that.

You can try this, download the ubuntu desktop.
Download Ubuntu | Ubuntu
you can burn it to a CD disk
You can run it as a liveCD, or even make a liveUSB thumb drive. You are then running it as a bootable drive which wont touch your hard drives at all.
Boot ubuntu, (will be slow to boot up as its on a cd or liveusb) and see if it can see those files on the extrenal drive.
Ubuntu CAN read NTFS partitions, if so then you can copy them back onto some other drive, then your ok.

For help you can ask questions there.
Ubuntu Forums

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