I have a disk drive that’s installed and used to work, but I can’t find it under My Computer (PC)/Finder (Mac). I really don’t want to lose all the data that I’ve got stored there. Is there anything that I can do?
Always try the simplest solution first, and then work your way up. When it comes to trouble situations with computers, rebooting often solves the problem and this situation is no different. Make sure your drive is firmly attached to your system, be it internal ribbon cables or external usb connectors, and then reboot your computer. If we’re talking about an external drive, make sure it’s plugged in and the power is on. Give the system time to boot and then try to browse to your drive. Did you find your files? Great – now go back up your data in case this happens again and you aren’t able to recover anything. Otherwise, keep reading…
So your drive still didn’t come up? You still may be able to resurrect the situation. It’s likely that the cause of your problem is a deleted or corrupt partition table. The partition table provides your computer with vital information about the storage device and without it, your drive is not going to work. There are a number of software packages that will recover lost partition information for a fee, but I’ve gone ahead and found one that will do the job for free: TestDisk from CGSecurity.org. Carefully follow the instructions for downloading and using TestDisk, and there is a good chance (although not a 100% certain one) that you’ll be able to get your hardware working again. I once had an external USB hard drive fail that contained thousands of tracks ripped from a gigantic CD collection – instead of spending weeks coverting that CD collection back to MP3s, TestDisk recovered the drive’s partition information and saved the day in seconds.
