external harddisk not recognized

Hi,

I have bought an externat harddrive enclousure for an IDE harddisk.
This harddisk comes from an defective notebook. The harddrive has no problems.

No if i connect the external harddisk to a desktop, the harrdis is not recognised.
See attatched picture.
I can make a new partition, but that's not an option as i don't want to loose
the contents of the harddisk.
This windows is in dutch.
Lools like the harddisk is not assigned "niet toegewezen".
WHat can i do?

 

black = unallocated , which therefore means there is nothing on the hd
ie. you have already lost its contents.
soz

 

I used to have a similar problem with an IDE drive on an older system. I had an 80GB drive where I would put XP and a secondary master with 250 GB for music, films, photos, games, etc. At every fresh XP install the 250 would not be recognised and I would always be advised by Windows to format it.Funny how windows wanted me to delete over 160 GB of data because it would not see the partitions. What you need to do is scan the disk at its surface and tell windows that there is a partition table/data on that HDD. There are several programs that give you a hand. Try any partition recovery software. If you need help, send me a pm and I will upload the software I use for crashed disks on my rapidshare account.

 

Contents are never lost. I retrieved data from formated drives. Data I had last year on one of my partitions.

 

It could be an error due to file system.It didn't have any encryption software right?

 

Right Click where the arrow is pointing and see if it needs initializing.

 

with right click i can only select properties, or new partition.

 

For an operating system to address the space available on a hard disk or any type of storage, that media must be formatted with a filesystem. If you're running Windows, NTFS is the order of the day.

If you wish to recover files, I suggest the free program Recuva. The program is easy to use, effective, and fast.

 

That is not entirely true. I have a 320 WD USB Drive and it is FAT32. I still use with FAT32 on my XP SP3 and I have no problems with it. If the disk is not damaged and there is data on it, drive info/partition table must be corrupt. Windows can only write a new one and that is why you are advised to format. Whereas, recovery tools, write a new partition table. I often had scenarios with drives where I created a virtual image from the broken disk, copied everything and had to format. That is the case when the drive is beyond partition table recovery.

 

Filesystems were never Microsoft's strong point until NTFS. You can use older filesystems, but it would be pointless. NTFS is more stable, faster, and can accomodate larger volumes than FAT and FAT32. NTFS can also handle larger files (4GB or more), and yields superior performance with larger volumes.