Chowder Head
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2005
- Messages
- 244
Hey guys, here's the skinny. I have an SSD, a 2TB primary storage drive, and two other 500GB drives in my computer. I noticed Windows 7 was getting a little sluggish so I decided to wipe the primary drive which is my SSD. I used DBAN on it to wipe it clean but prior to doing that I unplugged all the other hard drives to prevent the chance of them being affected.
When I loaded and reinstalled Windows everything was running smooth but my other hard drives weren't showing up in my computer. I know I have to locate them in disk management and I did, but it wanted me to format them in order to be seen (even though they were already formatted prior to wiping the primary hard drive). I did some research and found out they have tools to recover the data from formatted hard drives and downloaded Recuva.
I wiped the least important drive, the 500GB one, and tried Recuva on it. It picked up a lot of files and I had the recovered files sent to the same hard drive. In hind sight I shouldn't have done that because while the data was there, it was in pieces such as songs that were missing half the length on so on. I decided to try the 1TB drive but this time send it to the 500GB one. I could do this because obviously I didn't have a full TB worth of data but I will say that the files I sent over came out a lot clearer and nearly all the videos and music I've checked on the 500GB that were transferred from the 1TB one were intact, although it's difficult to sort the files by the dates modified so I haven't had the time to check all the files that were transferred over.
Which leads me to the most important point. The 2TB drive I have in my primary storage drive and although it has copies of what was on the other drives, it has a lot of other important files on there and I'm trying my best to make sure they come out clean.
Now my main question would be is there anything I can do to get this data off or allow the data to be seen? Again, it was formatted when I originally installed Windows 7 a while back and prior to wiping the hard drive, they were completely accessible. I just assumed I could plug it back in and Windows would recognize it without a problem since it was formatted already but that is not the case. So what exactly should I do? The 2TB is NOT formatted yet (meaning it is not showing up in the list of drives now after the new OS install) and I'm assuming the data is still on there but I can't access the drive without formatting it which means I would lose it all. What a pain in the ass this has become. Is there anyway to see what's on the hard drive? In the disk management it says the entire thing is filled with unallocated space and the only way I can access it is to format it again.
I have an external hard drive on the way (should have one already I know) and was wondering if I have any other options besides formatting the primary 2TB drive and using Recuva to send all the files to the external one. If there's a simple trick I'm not seeing please let me know! The files which I sent to the other hard drive remaining intact gives me some hope that this could be done but I want to see if there's anything else I can try.
I apologize for the lengthiness but I wanted to provide as much information as I can. Any replies would be an enormous help, thank you in advance!
When I loaded and reinstalled Windows everything was running smooth but my other hard drives weren't showing up in my computer. I know I have to locate them in disk management and I did, but it wanted me to format them in order to be seen (even though they were already formatted prior to wiping the primary hard drive). I did some research and found out they have tools to recover the data from formatted hard drives and downloaded Recuva.
I wiped the least important drive, the 500GB one, and tried Recuva on it. It picked up a lot of files and I had the recovered files sent to the same hard drive. In hind sight I shouldn't have done that because while the data was there, it was in pieces such as songs that were missing half the length on so on. I decided to try the 1TB drive but this time send it to the 500GB one. I could do this because obviously I didn't have a full TB worth of data but I will say that the files I sent over came out a lot clearer and nearly all the videos and music I've checked on the 500GB that were transferred from the 1TB one were intact, although it's difficult to sort the files by the dates modified so I haven't had the time to check all the files that were transferred over.
Which leads me to the most important point. The 2TB drive I have in my primary storage drive and although it has copies of what was on the other drives, it has a lot of other important files on there and I'm trying my best to make sure they come out clean.
Now my main question would be is there anything I can do to get this data off or allow the data to be seen? Again, it was formatted when I originally installed Windows 7 a while back and prior to wiping the hard drive, they were completely accessible. I just assumed I could plug it back in and Windows would recognize it without a problem since it was formatted already but that is not the case. So what exactly should I do? The 2TB is NOT formatted yet (meaning it is not showing up in the list of drives now after the new OS install) and I'm assuming the data is still on there but I can't access the drive without formatting it which means I would lose it all. What a pain in the ass this has become. Is there anyway to see what's on the hard drive? In the disk management it says the entire thing is filled with unallocated space and the only way I can access it is to format it again.
I have an external hard drive on the way (should have one already I know) and was wondering if I have any other options besides formatting the primary 2TB drive and using Recuva to send all the files to the external one. If there's a simple trick I'm not seeing please let me know! The files which I sent to the other hard drive remaining intact gives me some hope that this could be done but I want to see if there's anything else I can try.
I apologize for the lengthiness but I wanted to provide as much information as I can. Any replies would be an enormous help, thank you in advance!