Solved 7 will not recognize my 2nd. Drive after +-2 years? Ouch!

[Mike Lynch]

My 2nd. Drive is 4TB's in size and has been logically divided in half.
I used the first half for Backups and the second half for Family Photos, lot's of them.
Something happened and now 7 will not Boot while the Drive is installed.
If I disconnect the Drive, all is well.
I purchased an External Drive and Backed up my C: Drive to include an Image.
I can now live without the Backups on the first half but I really would like to "salvage" the Photo's.

Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated, PLEASE!

Best regards,

Mike Lynch

 

[Ranger4]

If you disconnect the drive & then boot will drive Windows still work if you hot connect the drive. If so could you supply a screen shot of Disc management. To do that follow this Forum tutorial.

Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image - Windows 7 Help Forums

Step 7 in the tutorial explains how to upload the screen shot.

 

[RolandJS]

I'm wondering if a usb or dvd Puppy Linux boot and using its file manager will work -- to copy off the data folders and files on that particular partition on the problematic external HD. Please report back if that idea works for you.

 

[jumanji]

Yes, go by Roland's suggestion.

First prepare your bootable Lucid Puppy pendrive using Rufus 2.14 (929KB) https://rufus.akeo.ie/

How to: My post #8 here Is there any way of saving a completely unrecognisable hard drive?

Connect your faulty drive and boot from the USB pendrive using the onetime boot Menu.

When Lucid Puppy boots, check whether you can mount the faulty drive and see the files. If you see the files copy those to the external drive.

Using Lucid Puppy: Go to the topic Recovering files from the non-bootable Internal Drive: in my thread here Lucid Puppy way to recover files from a non-bootable computer

 

[Mike Lynch]

I will try.

Some of the terms used in the Replies are new to me.
I'll research them and try to understand how to use the software they describe.
Then I will report back on the results,

Thank you for the replies.

Best regards,

Mike Lynch

 

[Mike Lynch]

I purchased a Thermaltake as I became frustrated opening and closing the PC as I fooled with the drive in question.

When I placed the drive in the device, it displayed both Logical Partitions AND the data in Partition Two was in tack.

I have since tried to copy Partition Two to another drive.

It appears the copy function does not have enough Free Space on Partition Two to run the copy.

When I display the drive using Start, Computer, Properties it displays the drive with a RED line representing the space on it.

I have attached a Snip to show this.