I have a WD external hard drive with a USB connection. I stored pictures and music that I recovered from a bad hard drive and also backup my current hard drive to it using Sync Back. My computer has always recognized the drive as an external drive like a SD card or USB flash thumb drive. Last week when I was downloading some pictures from an email, I decided to download to the external drive, which did not work. My computer now only recognizes the hard drive as a local disk and tells me that the drive isn’t formatted when I try to access it, and would I like to format it. I have not reformatted it, because I don’t want to lose my files. The files are still on the disk, I checked using a recovery program. What do I need to do to get the disk back to the previous status as an external drive and not a local one? Thank you for your assistance

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Recover the files with your recovery software to a working Hard Drive, then see if formating the drive fixes it.

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USB drives are SUPPOSED to be recognized as "Local Disks" in "My Computer".  The 
alternative to "Local Disk" is "Network Drive".  

So getting the hard drive "back to external drive" is irrelevant.  What you need 
to do is fix the damage that was apparently done to the drive's partition table, 
which is causing the PC to not recognize that the drive is formatted.  

If you can use recovery software to copy your data (or most of it) off the drive 
onto another one, that's what I'd do FIRST.  In case the drive is failing, you want 
to get as much data off of it as you can, before it gets worse, and possibly fails 
completely.

If you're able to get all your valuable data copied off of it using data recovery 
software, then you can try to reformat the drive and, if that goes well, perhaps 
put it back into service.  If you are NOT able to get your data copied off of it, 
I'd first try spinrite, from www.spinrite.com.  It will likely take many hours to 
run, but it's VERY good in this situation.  It will (hopefully) restore your drive 
back to normal...but, in case it doesn't, or in case your drive dies during the process, 
it will be good if you've first rescued as much data as possible from it.

If you run Spinrite and that doesn't help, then you'll want to try software that 
repairs the partition table, like this:  http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

 







On Monday, April 14, 2008 at 6:27 pm, stan wrote:

>I have a WD external hard drive with a USB connection. I stored pictures and music 

>that I recovered from a bad hard drive and also backup my current hard drive to 
it 

>using Sync Back. My computer has always recognized the drive as an external drive 

>like a SD card or USB flash thumb drive. Last week when I was downloading some pictures 

>from an email, I decided to download to the external drive, which did not work. 
My 

>computer now only recognizes the hard drive as a local disk and tells me that the 

>drive isn’t formatted when I try to access it, and would I like to format it. I 
have 

>not reformatted it, because I don’t want to lose my files. The files are still on 

>the disk, I checked using a recovery program. What do I need to do to get the disk 

>back to the previous status as an external drive and not a local one?

>

>Thank you for your assistance 
 

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Spinrite won't run on a USB drive.  It will have to be taken out of the enclosure 
and mounted into a desktop system for Spinrite to work at low level.  This is the 
best way to recover and work with a drive anyway.  Most likely however, the damage 
to the drive isn't something Spinrite is designed to fix/recover anyway if it's just 
corruption/FS damage.    IME, the enclosure interface has either failed or scrambled 
the drive (as a lot of chipsets in these units are known to do), if the drive is 
physically OK, or the drive was powered down/disconnected before it was finished 
writing to disk..

It's the biggest reason we don't ever count on an external USB/Firewire drive for 
reliable storage.  Either way, I have learned that it is best to work with recovery 
efforts and repair while there is no operating system loaded and running.  Windows 
utilities can work well in some instances, but you can also do more damage/corruption 
in other instances if the encloser interface is defective..

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I use Sprinrite on USB drives all the time.  It's slower, of course, but it works. 
 While it's very possible that the sort of damage is something Spinrite can't fix, 
it's also possible that it's something it CAN fix; only way to find out is to try.

Otherwise, I totally agree.







On Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 11:52 am, C K wrote:

>Spinrite won't run on a USB drive.  It will have to be taken out of the enclosure 

>and mounted into a desktop system for Spinrite to work at low level.  This is the 

>best way to recover and work with a drive anyway.  Most likely however, the damage 

>to the drive isn't something Spinrite is designed to fix/recover anyway if it's 
just 

>corruption/FS damage.    IME, the enclosure interface has either failed or scrambled 

>the drive (as a lot of chipsets in these units are known to do), if the drive is 

>physically OK, or the drive was powered down/disconnected before it was finished 

>writing to disk..

>

>It's the biggest reason we don't ever count on an external USB/Firewire drive for 

>reliable storage.  Either way, I have learned that it is best to work with recovery 

>efforts and repair while there is no operating system loaded and running.  Windows 

>utilities can work well in some instances, but you can also do more damage/corruption 

>in other instances if the encloser interface is defective.. 

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

Depends on the BIOS and the motherboard.  Won't run on any of mine unless I load 
additional drivers (older MBs), which isn't a good idea when working at the hardware 
level if you really want to protect your data.  Spinrite only tries to recover data 
and move it to a different area when the media is failing.  Has no other recovery 
option, so the only other things it is good for are checking readability and refreshing 
disk surfaces (which can corrupt data on an unstable system I have found).

Only an average of about 1 out of 200 drives I work on actually needs or has a problem 
that Spinrite can fix.  The electronics seem to fail more than the media, unless 
the heads are crashing, but then the heads are usually being damaged too.  Otherwise, 
I use professional software to recover data or fix corrupted partition tables.  At 
least this has been my experience on newer drives in the past 2-3 years but then 
that's when I started using all Seagates, as I had some terrible reliability issues 
on other brands when running under higher heat conditions.







On Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 12:21 pm, Ari wrote:

>I use Sprinrite on USB drives all the time.  It's slower, of course, but it works. 

> While it's very possible that the sort of damage is something Spinrite can't fix, 

>it's also possible that it's something it CAN fix; only way to find out is to try.

>

>Otherwise, I totally agree.

>

>

> 

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

I've also got a problem with a USB harddrive. Wehn plugged in, the icon will not show in My Computers but, I can use the Nero Backup application to write to it and it shows up in the hardware manager and when I click the USB stop it also shows up. I've looked at the threads and thought about the High Filters solution proposed but when I plug in my MP3/flash drive, it comes up on the My Computer directory, the Hardware Manager adn USB stop all as E: drive and the HD then moves from E: to F: but still not seen as an icon. When I go through the Hardware Manager properies and pull the drive up it is showing about 1/4th of teh drive used which I calculate it should based on the backups so it seems to be working that way. On my other XP laptop when I plugged it in it showed up as expected to it seems to be an OS issue. Any ideas?

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

You could try going into Control Panel, administrative tools, Computer management, 
Storage, Disk Management (Local), and setting the drive letter of the USB drive to 
something much further down in the alphabet, like M or N, then reboot, and see if 
it shows up as an icon then.







On Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 8:47 am, Brian Levy wrote:

>I've also got a problem with a USB harddrive. Wehn plugged in, the icon will not 

>show in My Computers but, I can use the Nero Backup application to write to it and 

>it shows up in the hardware manager and when I click the USB stop it also shows 
up. 

> I've looked at the threads and thought about the High Filters solution proposed 

>but when I plug in my MP3/flash drive, it comes up on the My Computer directory, 

>the Hardware Manager adn USB stop all as E: drive and the HD then moves from E: 
to 

>F: but still not seen as an icon.  When I go through the Hardware Manager properies 

>and pull the drive up it is showing about 1/4th of teh drive used which I calculate 

>it should based on the backups so it seems to be working that way.  On my other 
XP 

>laptop when I plugged it in it showed up as expected to it seems to be an OS issue. 

> Any ideas?
 

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