How to recover from unpartitioned maxtor harddrive

[dontapoligize]

Hi

Ok so i have an external maxtor 150gb hard drive that im trying to recover files from. i dont really know what went wrong with it but now its stopped working and now it says its unpartitioned

its my friends harddrive..when my harddrive failed, RMF worked like a charm to get everything back but i have no idea what shes done to hers. she gave it to a "technician" friend of hers and i dont know wtf he did to it but needless to say he didnt find anything.

i have already run:

Recover My Files - both fast & complete file search, as well as both fast & complete format recovery and it found 0 files

Stellar Phoenix Windows Recovery - Advanced Options - Raw Recovery, found nothing, and a Drive status scan showed 100% "bad sectors"

ive also tried Magic Rovery Pro - even tho it identifies a physical drive, a complete scan doesnt find a logical drive and so i cant scan for files

Im also scanning now with Active@Partition Recovery which looks like its going to take a week to finish (lol) but i dont think its going to find anythig

i really dont know what else i can try to do except do a "quick" format (as opposed to a complete format) and then use recover my files to try and retrieve any thing

does anyone have any ideas?

im pretty new to this kind of stuff and even tho i think ive got a slight hang of it, im sure i have a lot of learning to do!

thanks for any help!

[GDH]

It sounds like the drive has a physical problem and is not being recognized by your PC.

What does it say in MY COMPUTER > MANAGE > DISK MANAGEMENT or the system BIOS?

I doubt that you PC recognizes the drive. Your only option may be a hardware recovery service.

[dontapoligize]

it comes up as "not initialised" and "unallocated"

[GDH]

Hi,

"Not initialized" is not so great - means your PC cannot talk to your drive.

"Unallocated" suggests that the drive has been read.

Are these two messages in the same window? Click on the live support button (top right hand corner of this screen) so that I can chat with you.

thanks

[dontapoligize]

under device manager it doesnt recognise it as a volume

it says

"Disk 2
Unknown
150gb
not initialised"

then next to it, theres a little graph that says "unallocated"




thanks for ur help

[GDH]

The "not initialized" part is the killer. Check all drive connections etc. to see if you can get your pc to see the drive properly.

What does it say about the drive in the BIOS?

[rancelucifinil]

Alright buddy, now that you met this problem, why not take care in next time?

I think you'd better install a backup software, because data recovery software doesn't work every time. Right?

Now my idea is to download and install a backup software. Here I recommend you

PCNumen Backup: PCNumen - all the software that protect you from computer disaster? data loss, ect.
CVBackup: CVBackup - Convenient Backup Software, the best backup software for home and business use.

[DUKE]

Originally Posted by GDH

"Unallocated" suggests that the drive has been read.

Hello,
I'm having a similar problem. Except that I have only "Unallocated", It's all full of my info. It was split into two separate partitions.

The situation is. I have HDD (320Gb), I split it into 3 parts.:
1. 20 Gb for windows
2. 100 Gb
3. 200 Gb

And how can I fix Because now my PC recognizes partitions 2 and 3 as one "Unallocated".

How can it be fixed?