MY EXT. HARD DRIVE WORKED GREAT UNTILL...help?!

[Jezabellin]

I have a Sata 2.0 ext hdrive(90gb). It was given to me with 4 partitions on it. A friend went on my computer last night. I asked what they were doing to the drive. They were looking at how to partition it differently. 30 min later they claimed my computer shut off due to low battery and when they got it bk on the ext drive wouldn't work. I think they were trying to partition,format,and maybe change the format and something went wrong. They were using disc manager but won't come clean. Now it shows up in devices but not the bios. It won't let me access anyrhinf. No formatting et it says ime and drivers but it doesnt show it activated,its volume is a 0, as are some other of the other properties. Up all night trying to reset,wipe,writing commands,and trying to make sense of the event logs. Wish theyd be straight up and tell me what it was they did so I could have an easier time tirying to undo it right?!i just did a system restore on my pc to make sure it was strictly the drive. Any help from someone with a BIG BRAIN would be super fabulous! PLEASE HELLLLLP!

 

[Brennanathome]

Im not big with hard drives, but did you format it correctly for your PC? usually your computer wont recognize a format other than NTFS

 

[Jezabellin]

It was ntfs. I only used it a couple times for back ups. It was fine....

 

[jumanji]

Never mind what your friends did.

I believe that your hard disk should be OK. Only thing is that it got corrupted because of the sudden power loss.

Since you do not need to recover any data, that makes things easy to get your hard disk back to the factory condition.

Try the HDD LLF Low Level Format Tool HDDGURU: HDD LLF Low Level Format Tool - free for personal use.

You may use the one with Windows Installer or the Windows executable - that does not require installation.

Depending upon the capacity of your HDD, it may take quite sometime to finish its job of writing zeroes to each and every sector and reinitialising it.

So ensure that your laptop is fully powered for that duration, be patient and do not interrupt it.

Once it finishes its job, hopefully your HDD should come back alive, ready to be formatted the way you like.

 

[Jezabellin]

i can bring up the drive on the hd low level disk tool but it reads as unknown an unallocated and when i tried to initialize it,i received a error command. since then it wont even give me the option anymore to initialize it. ive tried going to properties on the drive and pushing for the volume which reads zero,and reloadind new drivers. also tried intializing and activating it with manual disk commands. i know its still spinning and works. if i could just get it to initialize or activate or show up in the bios etc...i could begin trying to repair it with the necessary tools/apps. ANY IDEAS?? IS IT TIME TO THROW IT OUT OR CAN IT STILL BE SAVED??

 

[alphanumeric]

Its not going to show up in the BIOS like your internal drives do. Its a USB device so it may only be listed as a USB device in the boot options menu. Plug it in and see if its listed in disk management. If it shows up delete all partitions and then repartition it and format it. Once that's done it should have a drive letter and be usable.

 

[Jezabellin]

Yes. Listed in disk management with 0 mb and unallocated space and doesnt give me the option to do anyrhing with it. It recognizes a usb device in boot options but doesnt say what it is. I think its not partitioned anymore and that is what my friend was doing when they lost power went off and the problem started. Am I looking at having to fix this through dos commands? Ps. . Do you own this site?

 

[alphanumeric]

No I do not own this site. You might have better luck removing the drive from the enclosure and connecting it directly to your motherboard, bypassing the USB adapter. If disk management won't work you could try opening an elevated command prompt and using diskpart to partition it.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/783-elevated-command-prompt.html
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2674-partition-volume-create-new.html