external drive failed?

When I left to go to work, my HP 734n WinXP Pro SP3 computer worked just
fine. When I came home from work, I tried to bring the computer out of
standby the usual way, by tapping a key on the keyboard. Nothing happened.
The computer would not come out of standby or respond in any other way to
tapping a key or any combination keys such as ctrl-alt-delete. I had to hit
the switch to turn the computer off and then again to turn it on to get the
thing to boot.

Now, I have an external (Maxtor) hard drive that is partitioned into 2
drives H and I. After the boot, I ran Norton Ghost which reported that the H
drive, which was being used for backup, was 'unavailable'. I then brought up
Windows Explorer to discover that neither partition appeared in the folder
tree or anywhere else. For all practical purposes, the drive(s) doesn't
(don't) exist!

I tried System Restore, reinstalling the drivers for the (Maxtor) drive,
uninstalling Norton Ghost and again reinstalling the Maxtor drivers. Nothing
worked. Although
the operating system acknowledged the installation of new hardware via the
system tray bubble and the gong, the drives were still not visible in WE or
to Ghost.

Also I should mention that before I left for work, there were some Microsoft
updates pending, which I ignored and which evidently installed themselves
while I was gone. Perhaps these updates are the culprits.

Any ideas out there how to fix? Is my drive probably kaput or what?


--
ray124c41

"ray124c41" wrote in message
...
When I left to go to work, my HP 734n WinXP Pro SP3 computer worked just
fine. When I came home from work, I tried to bring the computer out of
standby the usual way, by tapping a key on the keyboard. Nothing
happened.
The computer would not come out of standby or respond in any other way to
tapping a key or any combination keys such as ctrl-alt-delete. I had to
hit
the switch to turn the computer off and then again to turn it on to get
the
thing to boot.

Now, I have an external (Maxtor) hard drive that is partitioned into 2
drives H and I. After the boot, I ran Norton Ghost which reported that
the H
drive, which was being used for backup, was 'unavailable'. I then brought
up
Windows Explorer to discover that neither partition appeared in the folder
tree or anywhere else. For all practical purposes, the drive(s) doesn't
(don't) exist!

I tried System Restore, reinstalling the drivers for the (Maxtor) drive,
uninstalling Norton Ghost and again reinstalling the Maxtor drivers.
Nothing
worked. Although
the operating system acknowledged the installation of new hardware via the
system tray bubble and the gong, the drives were still not visible in WE
or
to Ghost.

Also I should mention that before I left for work, there were some
Microsoft
updates pending, which I ignored and which evidently installed themselves
while I was gone. Perhaps these updates are the culprits.

Any ideas out there how to fix? Is my drive probably kaput or what?


--
ray124c41

If you cannot see any partitions in Explorer then you must create them in
the Disk Manager. Click Start / Run / diskmgmt.msc to launch it.

"Pegasus (MVP)" wrote in message
...

"ray124c41" wrote in message
...
When I left to go to work, my HP 734n WinXP Pro SP3 computer worked just
fine. When I came home from work, I tried to bring the computer out of
standby the usual way, by tapping a key on the keyboard. Nothing
happened.
The computer would not come out of standby or respond in any other way to
tapping a key or any combination keys such as ctrl-alt-delete. I had to
hit
the switch to turn the computer off and then again to turn it on to get
the
thing to boot.

Now, I have an external (Maxtor) hard drive that is partitioned into 2
drives H and I. After the boot, I ran Norton Ghost which reported that
the H
drive, which was being used for backup, was 'unavailable'. I then
brought up
Windows Explorer to discover that neither partition appeared in the
folder
tree or anywhere else. For all practical purposes, the drive(s) doesn't
(don't) exist!

I tried System Restore, reinstalling the drivers for the (Maxtor) drive,
uninstalling Norton Ghost and again reinstalling the Maxtor drivers.
Nothing
worked. Although
the operating system acknowledged the installation of new hardware via
the
system tray bubble and the gong, the drives were still not visible in WE
or
to Ghost.

Also I should mention that before I left for work, there were some
Microsoft
updates pending, which I ignored and which evidently installed themselves
while I was gone. Perhaps these updates are the culprits.

Any ideas out there how to fix? Is my drive probably kaput or what?


--
ray124c41

If you cannot see any partitions in Explorer then you must create them in
the Disk Manager. Click Start / Run / diskmgmt.msc to launch it.

Won't that delete all the data currently held on that external drive.

A far better idea would be to see if the drive is accessible on another PC.

"M.I.5¾" wrote in message
...

"Pegasus (MVP)" wrote in message
...

"ray124c41" wrote in message
...
When I left to go to work, my HP 734n WinXP Pro SP3 computer worked just
fine. When I came home from work, I tried to bring the computer out of
standby the usual way, by tapping a key on the keyboard. Nothing
happened.
The computer would not come out of standby or respond in any other way
to
tapping a key or any combination keys such as ctrl-alt-delete. I had to
hit
the switch to turn the computer off and then again to turn it on to get
the
thing to boot.

Now, I have an external (Maxtor) hard drive that is partitioned into 2
drives H and I. After the boot, I ran Norton Ghost which reported that
the H
drive, which was being used for backup, was 'unavailable'. I then
brought up
Windows Explorer to discover that neither partition appeared in the
folder
tree or anywhere else. For all practical purposes, the drive(s)
doesn't
(don't) exist!

I tried System Restore, reinstalling the drivers for the (Maxtor) drive,
uninstalling Norton Ghost and again reinstalling the Maxtor drivers.
Nothing
worked. Although
the operating system acknowledged the installation of new hardware via
the
system tray bubble and the gong, the drives were still not visible in
WE or
to Ghost.

Also I should mention that before I left for work, there were some
Microsoft
updates pending, which I ignored and which evidently installed
themselves
while I was gone. Perhaps these updates are the culprits.

Any ideas out there how to fix? Is my drive probably kaput or what?


--
ray124c41

If you cannot see any partitions in Explorer then you must create them in
the Disk Manager. Click Start / Run / diskmgmt.msc to launch it.

Won't that delete all the data currently held on that external drive.

A far better idea would be to see if the drive is accessible on another
PC.


Launching diskmgmt.msc won't delete anything but creating new partitions
will. If the OP wishes to attempt to salvage the data kept on the external
disk then he has several options, e.g.
- Connect the disk to another PC (as per your suggestion)
- Try one of the many partition recovery programs
- Ask a recovery service to check it out.

"Pegasus (MVP)" wrote in message
...

"ray124c41" wrote in message
...
When I left to go to work, my HP 734n WinXP Pro SP3 computer worked
just fine. When I came home from work, I tried to bring the
computer out of standby the usual way, by tapping a key on the
keyboard. Nothing happened.
The computer would not come out of standby or respond in any other
way to tapping a key or any combination keys such as
ctrl-alt-delete. I had to hit
the switch to turn the computer off and then again to turn it on to
get the
thing to boot.

Now, I have an external (Maxtor) hard drive that is partitioned
into 2 drives H and I. After the boot, I ran Norton Ghost which
reported that the H
drive, which was being used for backup, was 'unavailable'. I then
brought up
Windows Explorer to discover that neither partition appeared in the
folder
tree or anywhere else. For all practical purposes, the drive(s)
doesn't (don't) exist!

I tried System Restore, reinstalling the drivers for the (Maxtor)
drive, uninstalling Norton Ghost and again reinstalling the Maxtor
drivers. Nothing
worked. Although
the operating system acknowledged the installation of new hardware
via the
system tray bubble and the gong, the drives were still not visible
in WE or
to Ghost.

Also I should mention that before I left for work, there were some
Microsoft
updates pending, which I ignored and which evidently installed
themselves while I was gone. Perhaps these updates are the
culprits. Any ideas out there how to fix? Is my drive probably
kaput or what?


--
ray124c41

If you cannot see any partitions in Explorer then you must create
them in the Disk Manager. Click Start / Run / diskmgmt.msc to launch
it.

Won't that delete all the data currently held on that external drive.

A far better idea would be to see if the drive is accessible on
another PC.

No; you'd have to do a format or remove a partition to destroy data.
Sometimes a drive just gets "lost" and need to have its drive letter
reassigned, which can be done there, if it sees the drives, which it
will report as not having a drive letter.
Assign the drive letters and all might be fine. Worth a try since it's
quick & easy to do.

Indeed. I went to the Maxtor web site and through their troubleshooting
procedure ended up opening 'Computer Management/Disk Management' which
reports that Disk 1 is 'Not Initialized' and has 189.2 GB capacity and is
'Unallocated'.

According to the Maxtor page, WE will 'see' the drive when it's
initialized, etc., but, as has been pointed out, this will wipe out what's on
the drive and there is a lot of stuff I would like to recover (none of it
critical), so I will make some attempt at data recovery.

You see the irony he 'H' was my backup partition. LOL. 'I' had the
aforementioned stuff on it.

Thank you all for your input, especially the tips about data recovery.

By the way, any ideas about:
1}what caused the computer to not be able to come out of standby and
2)what caused the drive to crash?
--
ray124c41


"Pegasus (MVP)" wrote:


"ray124c41" wrote in message
...
When I left to go to work, my HP 734n WinXP Pro SP3 computer worked just
fine. When I came home from work, I tried to bring the computer out of
standby the usual way, by tapping a key on the keyboard. Nothing
happened.
The computer would not come out of standby or respond in any other way to
tapping a key or any combination keys such as ctrl-alt-delete. I had to
hit
the switch to turn the computer off and then again to turn it on to get
the
thing to boot.

Now, I have an external (Maxtor) hard drive that is partitioned into 2
drives H and I. After the boot, I ran Norton Ghost which reported that
the H
drive, which was being used for backup, was 'unavailable'. I then brought
up
Windows Explorer to discover that neither partition appeared in the folder
tree or anywhere else. For all practical purposes, the drive(s) doesn't
(don't) exist!

I tried System Restore, reinstalling the drivers for the (Maxtor) drive,
uninstalling Norton Ghost and again reinstalling the Maxtor drivers.
Nothing
worked. Although
the operating system acknowledged the installation of new hardware via the
system tray bubble and the gong, the drives were still not visible in WE
or
to Ghost.

Also I should mention that before I left for work, there were some
Microsoft
updates pending, which I ignored and which evidently installed themselves
while I was gone. Perhaps these updates are the culprits.

Any ideas out there how to fix? Is my drive probably kaput or what?


--
ray124c41

If you cannot see any partitions in Explorer then you must create them in
the Disk Manager. Click Start / Run / diskmgmt.msc to launch it.

ray124c41 wrote:

Indeed. I went to the Maxtor web site and through their troubleshooting
procedure ended up opening 'Computer Management/Disk Management' which
reports that Disk 1 is 'Not Initialized' and has 189.2 GB capacity and is
'Unallocated'.

According to the Maxtor page, WE will 'see' the drive when it's
initialized, etc., but, as has been pointed out, this will wipe out what's on
the drive and there is a lot of stuff I would like to recover (none of it
critical), so I will make some attempt at data recovery.

You see the irony he 'H' was my backup partition. LOL. 'I' had the
aforementioned stuff on it.

Thank you all for your input, especially the tips about data recovery.

By the way, any ideas about:
1}what caused the computer to not be able to come out of standby and
2)what caused the drive to crash?

One additional thought. There should not be any concerns if the
data backed up to Drive H still exists in its original, source
location. If not, then there was no backup. Backup implies that
there is a minimum of 2 sets of the same material.

As for the failure to come out of standby, the conclusion of the
[automatic] updates might have required a re-boot, control over
which was intercepted by the computer going into standby or
hibernation. It is not really a good idea to do Windows updates
blindly.

Finally, did the external hard drive actually crash or is it no
longer seen by this particular computer. Was the external hard
drive tested in another computer? An unexpected shutdown, such as
a result of going into standby or hibernation, can be disruptive.

As to your 1st point, there were 2 partitions on the external disk, 'H' and
'I'. 'H' was being used by Norton Ghost to back up my 'C' drive, which is
intact, so no loss there. However, the 'I' partition was being used for
stuff I preferred not to keep on the 'C' drive. As I said, not critical
stuff, but losing it is an inconvenience.

As to your 2nd point, it occurred to me also that updates requiring a reboot
(almost all MS updates do) might be a problem, although I could not have said
why. I will take your advice about how to do Windows updates.

To answer your question, the drive is no longer seen by Windows Explorer or
Norton Ghost. It is however, seen by 'Computer Management/Disk Management'
and there the drive appears not to be initialized or partitioned, as I said
before.

So, to summarize your points, the cause of both problems could have been the
computer going into standby while it was trying to do something else.

Now, I've been using the external drive for about a year just for extra
storage and not for backup. I've also allowed Automatic Updates for at least
that long. The interval until standby has been 5 minutes for at least that
long as well.

Now, since neither problem occurred until the Ghost installation, my
prejudice is that it was the conflict between standby and Ghost doing it's
thing that caused both, or between Ghost and something else. It just seems
unlikely that Ghost was not involved since I'd had the aforementioned setup
for so long without a problem and Ghost installed for only a week or so when
the problems occurred.

At any rate, to implement your suggestions I'm going to try to use Scheduled
Tasks to run backups and Windows Updates. This should prevent the
aforementioned conflicts from occurring.

Thanks much for your input. It was most useful. Frankly, I really hadn't
a clue as to what might have caused what seems an outlandish pair of events
and therefore unable to prevent their reoccurrence

..--
ray124c41


"Ghostrider" wrote:


ray124c41 wrote:

Indeed. I went to the Maxtor web site and through their troubleshooting
procedure ended up opening 'Computer Management/Disk Management' which
reports that Disk 1 is 'Not Initialized' and has 189.2 GB capacity and is
'Unallocated'.

According to the Maxtor page, WE will 'see' the drive when it's
initialized, etc., but, as has been pointed out, this will wipe out what's on
the drive and there is a lot of stuff I would like to recover (none of it
critical), so I will make some attempt at data recovery.

You see the irony he 'H' was my backup partition. LOL. 'I' had the
aforementioned stuff on it.

Thank you all for your input, especially the tips about data recovery.

By the way, any ideas about:
1}what caused the computer to not be able to come out of standby and
2)what caused the drive to crash?

One additional thought. There should not be any concerns if the
data backed up to Drive H still exists in its original, source
location. If not, then there was no backup. Backup implies that
there is a minimum of 2 sets of the same material.

As for the failure to come out of standby, the conclusion of the
[automatic] updates might have required a re-boot, control over
which was intercepted by the computer going into standby or
hibernation. It is not really a good idea to do Windows updates
blindly.

Finally, did the external hard drive actually crash or is it no
longer seen by this particular computer. Was the external hard
drive tested in another computer? An unexpected shutdown, such as
a result of going into standby or hibernation, can be disruptive.

Success! I managed to restore both partitions. Turns out the disk's MBR was
mangled, so the OS couldn't see it's partition table which was why Windows
Explorer couldn't display the partitions on the disk.

I used TestDisk, (real honest to God freeware, but the learning curve is a
killer) and brought back one partition completely and the other enough so
that it was at least recognized generally by OS components (and not just by
Disk Management). I then used "chkdsk H: /F" on the command line to restore
completely the aforementioned other.

TestDisk allows you to copy stuff from a partition after you find the
partition, but before you try fixing it, if the partition's file system is
NTFS. Fortunately, both partitions were NTFS and I saved some stuff before I
tried a fix, because if the fix hadn't worked I could have lost the contents
of the partition permanently.

My only complaints about TestDisk are that the interface is a bit sketchy,
analyzing the disk takes a LONG time and the documentation, while voluminous,
didn't seem to always contain answers to questions one might have like,
'What is the meaning of the message "bad relative sector"?'.

However, TestDisk works and it's free!

--
ray124c41


"ray124c41" wrote:


As to your 1st point, there were 2 partitions on the external disk, 'H' and
'I'. 'H' was being used by Norton Ghost to back up my 'C' drive, which is
intact, so no loss there. However, the 'I' partition was being used for
stuff I preferred not to keep on the 'C' drive. As I said, not critical
stuff, but losing it is an inconvenience.

As to your 2nd point, it occurred to me also that updates requiring a reboot
(almost all MS updates do) might be a problem, although I could not have said
why. I will take your advice about how to do Windows updates.

To answer your question, the drive is no longer seen by Windows Explorer or
Norton Ghost. It is however, seen by 'Computer Management/Disk Management'
and there the drive appears not to be initialized or partitioned, as I said
before.

So, to summarize your points, the cause of both problems could have been the
computer going into standby while it was trying to do something else.

Now, I've been using the external drive for about a year just for extra
storage and not for backup. I've also allowed Automatic Updates for at least
that long. The interval until standby has been 5 minutes for at least that
long as well.

Now, since neither problem occurred until the Ghost installation, my
prejudice is that it was the conflict between standby and Ghost doing it's
thing that caused both, or between Ghost and something else. It just seems
unlikely that Ghost was not involved since I'd had the aforementioned setup
for so long without a problem and Ghost installed for only a week or so when
the problems occurred.

At any rate, to implement your suggestions I'm going to try to use Scheduled
Tasks to run backups and Windows Updates. This should prevent the
aforementioned conflicts from occurring.

Thanks much for your input. It was most useful. Frankly, I really hadn't
a clue as to what might have caused what seems an outlandish pair of events
and therefore unable to prevent their reoccurrence

.--
ray124c41


"Ghostrider" wrote:


ray124c41 wrote:

Indeed. I went to the Maxtor web site and through their troubleshooting
procedure ended up opening 'Computer Management/Disk Management' which
reports that Disk 1 is 'Not Initialized' and has 189.2 GB capacity and is
'Unallocated'.

According to the Maxtor page, WE will 'see' the drive when it's
initialized, etc., but, as has been pointed out, this will wipe out what's on
the drive and there is a lot of stuff I would like to recover (none of it
critical), so I will make some attempt at data recovery.

You see the irony he 'H' was my backup partition. LOL. 'I' had the
aforementioned stuff on it.

Thank you all for your input, especially the tips about data recovery.

By the way, any ideas about:
1}what caused the computer to not be able to come out of standby and
2)what caused the drive to crash?

One additional thought. There should not be any concerns if the
data backed up to Drive H still exists in its original, source
location. If not, then there was no backup. Backup implies that
there is a minimum of 2 sets of the same material.

As for the failure to come out of standby, the conclusion of the
[automatic] updates might have required a re-boot, control over
which was intercepted by the computer going into standby or
hibernation. It is not really a good idea to do Windows updates
blindly.

Finally, did the external hard drive actually crash or is it no
longer seen by this particular computer. Was the external hard
drive tested in another computer? An unexpected shutdown, such as
a result of going into standby or hibernation, can be disruptive.