280GB External HDD problem

[Galaxy High]

Hello all,

I have an external 280GB HDD connected through firewire to my computer running XP SP2. My HDD is nearly full (only 10GB to go) but now i've stumbled across a problem.

After recieving the blue screen off death, again, I accidently unpartitioned, I think, my HDD. (under 'disk management' in 'computer management' it says '280Gb... Online... Unallocated')

Im scared to start playing around with it in case I lose all my data!! Is it a simple case of re-partioning it, if so how? or is the data lost forever?

hope that makes sense,
all help much apreciated.

cheers,
sam.

 

[PanicX]

Repartitioning / formatting will surely destroy all your data. You'll need to use a data recovery utility to pull your data off this drive. Unfortunately, you'll need to have another 280 GB drive to store this data on, once its recovered.

However, if you didn't unpartition it and filesystem became corrupt as the result of a BSOD, then it's possible that you can recover your data using the chkdisk utility.

I've used Recover4All with success in the past with this kind of an issue. ($69)

 

[Galaxy High]

'Recover 4 All' doesnt 'see' the HD. What else could i do??

 

[PanicX]

Well there's other solutions for data recovery, I know that Ontrack is a favorite of some. But if you're drive isn't being recognized at all, you may need to use a drive recovery service. Unfortunately drive recovery is not cheap, I've had to pay $400 for service plus the price of a new hard drive to put the data on.