Solved External drives show in Device Manager & Disk Manager but not Computer

[Dick1030]

External drives show in Device Manager & Disk Manager but not Computer

Two of my USB external Hard drives, a Fantom 600 GB and a Western Digital My Book 500GB cannot be seen in My Computer. I can see them in Device Manager and that says that they are working properly and the drivers are up to Date. In Disk Manager the 2 external drives had a black bar unlike the other drives which had blue bars. The 2 external disks had a number assigned to them but no letter.

I have tried diskpart in the command prompt, was able to assign a letter, then had to format the drives and they did show up in My computer as valid empty external hard drives with the correct amount of space on them. But when I tried to recover the backed up data for one of the disks (less than a third of the capacity of either drive) they went back to not being recognized by My Computer ans in disk manager had a black line with no letter again.

I just went through that process again, got both drives back and tried to recover the backed up files to my Fantom drive and lost the Fantom drive once again.

I am attaching screen shots of my current My Computer (Computer in 7) Device Manager and Disk Manager. In Device Manager you can see the Fantom. The My Book is the WD 5000AAV. In Disk Manager the My Book shows healthy with Disk 1 and the letter L. The Fantom is Disk 2 with no letter and a black bar. In My computer, the My Book is there but not the Fantom.

Any ideas for this. I am about to just recover my computer to factory setup and start new. I have saved all my important files and mail to the newer Toshiba Canvio.

Thanks in advance.

Dick

 

[jumanji]

Hi Dick1030,

Welcome to Seven Forums.


Please do as follows:

1. It is unusual for the System Reserved Partition to have a drive letter. Please remove the drive letter.

2. Please remove (always Safely Remove) all the external drives including any card reader and do a drive cleanup as indicated here. http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/298744-usb-thumb-drives-not-recognised-not-drive-letter.html#post2477076 It will clean your system of all non-present devices and you will be starting with a clean slate.(Incidentally this can resolve many drive letter assignment confusion of Windows OS, as you can see in the referenced thread.)

3. After you reboot on completion of the drive cleanup, plugin only your WD My Book and the Fantom drive. As you plug-in the driver for each device will be installed ab-initio. You can watch it.

4. Now take a screenshot of the Disk Management and post. While taking the screenshot, click on "Show/Hide Console Tree” and “Show/Hide Action Pane” buttons on the toolbar on top to hide those and also pull up the center partition line up as much as possible so that we get a clear and full view.





5. Also tell us whether you are sure that you had formatted the Fantom drive and it contains data and whether you want to recover the data..


(Your statements and the screenshots are so confusing - atleast to me - it is necessary that you do the above and restate the problem.)

 

[Dick1030]

Jumanji,

I did what you said. I got rid of all the drives that were not really there and when I added the My Book Drive and the Fantom Drive I got a useable drive for the My Book but the Fantom came back with no letter and was not in Computer.

I believe I chose to create a simple disk (I should have taken note of that, sorry.) and it asked if I wanted to format with a letter and name and I did. That seems to have worked and I tried to drag and drop a file folder to both drives. that worked and I went no further. (Attachment 08.28 1612 Disk Mgmt.JPG)

I do not have the larger Toshiba Canvio drive attached yet and that is where I have run into problems. When I have tried to recover my files, which are on the Toshiba, from Acronis, it starts to go through the recovery and then whichever smaller drive I try, My Book or Fantom, that drive dies and the recovery stops.

I then get the Disk Management screen like the second attachment with no drive letter. (Attachment Disk Manager 08.28 1330.JPG) That is the same that I got when I finished with the drive clean up before I formatted the Fantom.

I hope that is clear enough.

Thanks.

 

[jumanji]

The screenshots look good.

I see you are online. I shall take sometime to formulate my thoughts and respond squeezing it inbetween my other schedules..

You may go to sleep now and perhaps see my post your tomorrow morning. Good night.

 

[jumanji]

OK. Now I get a clear picture. Per se there seems to be absolutely no problem with the WD My Book or the Fantom drives. You can format the Fantom drive and it is usable.

You have now brought in a third drive the Toshiba Canvio

...... I do not have the larger Toshiba Canvio drive attached yet and that is where I have run into problems. When I have tried to recover my files, which are on the Toshiba, from Acronis, it starts to go through the recovery and then whichever smaller drive I try, My Book or Fantom, that drive dies and the recovery stops.

I then get the Disk Management screen like the second attachment with no drive letter. (Attachment Disk Manager 08.28 1330.JPG) That is the same that I got when I finished with the drive clean up before I formatted the Fantom.

I hope that is clear enough.Thanks.

Your Toshiba drive also seems to be OK ( as seen in the Screenshot in your first post). I strongly believe it is the process that you are adopting that mucks up the first sector of the host drive making it unallocated. It could be Acronis.

You can now connect the Toshiba drive to your PC and I am sure the driver will be installed and should show up in Disk Management, Healthy as before.

If it mounts so, you should be able to straight away see whatever data is there on your Toshiba drive in Windows and copy to any other drive. I am just baffled. How does "recovery" or "Acronis" come into picture? What exactly are you trying to do? What exactly is the data on the Toshiba drive which you are trying to "recover"?

More questions, but I can't help. Still trying to learn.

 

[Dick1030]

Thanks, Jumanji.

The Acronis backup program and recovery come in because I have Acronis using my Toshiba drive to store my backup. That is normally the only thing on the Toshiba. I had all 3 drives attached this morning and the Drive Management looke like the first screenshot attached here (08.29 1030 Disk Management.JPG)

Then I attempted a recovery of the My Book, which are the files Acronis backed up from the My Book Drive. The Acronis Recovery went through the steps of verifying the backup files and the drives and then appeared to be starting the recovery of those files from the Acronis backup on the Toshiba to the My Book. Shortly after I, once again, lost the My Book, as you can see from the 2nd screenshot (08.29 1055 Disk Management After Recovery Attempt.JPG)

The files that I am trying to recover are pictures, videos, music, etc. Not really terribly important. I would just like to have them back.
http://www.sevenforums.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=283714&stc=1&d=1377788259

 

[jumanji]

Oh! my folly. I could never imagine using a backup software to image any data, keep it in that software's proprietary image format and then try to unwind it.

Your folly - according to my personal perception - having done it so and worst with Acronis.

( Long long back when Acronis was the ruling King in Imaging software, I had used it and again long long back I shunned it because all reports suggested that it modifies the MBR in someway that one cannot try or shift to any other Imaging software - there was indeed a lot of hue and cry then.)

I have completely lost touch with Acronis and so I can't be of much help in this problem. As I said already the process you are adopting is the cause of your problem. May be someone still using Acronis can look into it and help you. And so I stop here.

But not before giving you this piece of advice.

An imaging software is basically intended to image your system drive and restore it in a jiffy in case the OS gets shot.

As far as data is concerned, always back it up as a one to one copy. No need to use any imaging software. As far as photos, audio and video are concerned those are already compressed (mostly) and there is no further need to compress it. As far as other data, if you have too many of a kind you can zip it and copy it.( All contracts received from my stock broker, I zip it when it reaches 100)

( If you look into the screenshot I posted in post#2, my data partitions, Audio, Photo and Video partitions all are copied as one to one on an external drive. I use SyncBack (free) 2BrightSparks | SyncBackFree, SyncBackSE, and SyncBackPro to backup and update the backups periodically.)

Note: Since you said these are only backups, you still must have the originals and so I think there is no need for any sort of data recovery. You need to only change the practice.)

 

[Dick1030]

I decided that I was having too much trouble with my computer in addition to not being able to recover from my Acronis backup.

After copying all important files to the one external disk that was working, I restored my PC to it's factory state. Through a combination of copying my files from the external disk and using Acronis to recover the information for one of my external hard drives I was fine.

The problem was not Acronis but an erratic and unstable PC. All seems to be working well at this time. Life is good!

Thank you for all your help.

Dick