Problem with Western Digital HDDs

[Mean_dm]

So a friend of mine handed me two WD HDDs that weren't working, asking me for help...but I' a bit lost now.

I would plug everything up and boot up --->Windows 7<--- go to My Computer but I would only be able to see my Seagate HD, not his WD HDDs... SO I went into Computer Management -> Disk Management and I can see the two HDDs besides my own. Both of his HDDs say ~150g of unallocated space... He says he should have years of pictures and what not on these two hard drives, so what am I dealing with here?

[Psykoikonov]

I would attempt to assign them a drive letter in diskmgmt.msc first (don't format them for any reason just assign a drive letter if possible) and see if they magically appear but sounds like that is not the case. Unallocated space usually means the partition table has been wiped. Probably have to use some third party software to see if any of the data is recoverable, unfortunately I don't know of any good ones of hand but I'm sure others here do.

[Mean_dm]

When I right click on the drive to change the letter, I don't see the option to do so, all I see is:

New Simple Volume
New Spanned Volume
New Striped Volume
New Mirrored Volume
--------------------
Properties
--------------------
Help


That's all I see, I can see the option on my HDD, but not on the two malfunctioning drives.

[Psykoikonov]

Unfortunately I believe you'll have to use 3rd party recovery tools to try to get the data off of them, which I am not familiar with. I know they exist and hopefully someone here could point you to one.

[Xaotic]

I use R-Studio from r-tt.com. It's not free, but works well. Others include getdataback and others in the paid software type. You could also try PC Inspector as a freeware alternative. Needless to say, do not write anything to the disks before recovery and you will need a plave to store the data.

[Berne]

Hi,
I have heard many great reports about Spinrite for data recovery, see www.qrc.com .

Good Luck,

Berne:chair: