Not showing partition for old IDE Hard drive

Greetings!   

I have just purchased a Rosewill adapter for my ancient IDE hard drive. The good news is it's all hooked up and working great!! However, I do believe that it is partitioned. Because when I look at the properties of the hard drive it says that there is over 100Gb of data on there. When I explore it I'm only seeing a fraction of the data. There's no pictures, videos, or music. It's just basic things. And most of the time when I click to open a folder nothing is in it. So, I'm pretty sure I partitioned it at some point. Is there a possibility that it's not showing the partition? 

Any help in the matter would be greatly appreciated! I have precious data on there of my little girl!

Thanks so much!

Hi Bernadettey, and welcome to the WTT forums.

Please take a screen shot of your disc management page and upload it here, so we can see what is going on.

Here's how to access disk management:

Click on Start and type in the search box

diskmgmt.exe

press Enter key

(for Win XP use Start and then Run)

Here's how to post the screen shot: (with the disk management page open)

1 click on Alt + Prt Scn ( hold down the Alt key and at the same time press Prt Scn key)

2 click on Start…all Programs…Accessories…paint (or mspaint)

3 left click in the blank white area

4 press Ctl+v (the screen shot will be pasted in)

5 click on File

6 click on Save (save it to your desktop, or anywhere else you can be sure of finding it!)

7 name it as screendump01 Please make sure you save it as a .jpg else it may be too big to upload

8 Next whilst back in your topic on the forum add any comments and then:

9 click on more reply options/browse… attach the file browse to Desktop or other location you chose to save your screen shot

10 find the screenshot and select it, click on the upload button

11 then on the lower left…after it says upload successful

  click on add reply like you normally would.

Regards

paws
 

Paws…

Thanks so much for the quick reply! Here is the screen shot of disk management

Hi Bernadettey,

Thanks for the screen shot…….That all looks good….

Your f drive( the old IDE hard drive) seems to have around 100Gib of space used on it with around 40Gb currently shown as free space.

There are no other partitions shown…… the whole of the drive (apart from the usual small overhead  and the 2.5Gb that is shown as unallocated) is available for use.

So unfortunately if the files you need are not being shown, or the folders are shown as empty the most likely explanation is that they have been emptied and stuff in them deleted….

All is not lost….. if say important files of your family were on the disc at one time, then its likely that they will still be there….. its just its going to be difficult to  recover them…..(Its very difficult to remove files from a hard disc completely, there is often a trace left and data recovery services can work wonders at recovering data files, photos, documents and the like……

However the process is time consuming, needs great expertise and equipment and is costly, when performed by specialist data recovery professionals

You could enquire locally in your country for an estimate from a data recovery specialst of good repute to see if you think its worthwhile…..

( in my location the costs tend to start at around GBP £400 to £600, say around (USD $600-$1000 and can quickly escalate, so its only for really important stuff!

If you wanted to try a no cost "Do it Yourself" approach then some folks have achieved success by using a Live distro of Linux  ( Linux Puppy is good and a relatively small download as well as being free) andLinux can sometimes "see" stuff that Windows has difficulty with, perhaps due to file permission issues and the like….

Recuva from Piriform is an excellent tool that has a good reputation, there is a free  version available from here:

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Post back and let us know how you get on.

Regards

paws

Hello!

I just got Piriform.. and with some success.. I was able to recover old videos!! Wonderful, precious videos I'm scanning it now for images. 

I will keep you informed! 

Hi Bernadettey,

That's wonderful news…well done  

Be careful to copy anything you manage to save, well away from the old hard drive, so as not to overwrite any data on it …

Regards

paws