Moved Disk not recognized by XP

My external HD (Maxtor Onetouch 200G) disappeared from view on my PC recently (no drive letter visible). Turns out the HDD inside this unit is one that is often an OEM internal drive - Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 (6Y200PO). So I removed the internal drive unit, installed it my PC, to see if it was the external circuitry that was the issue.

It installed fine (ok in Device management). So now I can see the drive in Disk Management, (Drive 1 - unallocated), but it pops up the "Convert Drive Wizard" when I open disk management.

If I go ahead to "initialize", what happens? Will it make the data on the drive inaccessible? The whole point here is to save the 100G of data that was on the drive before it went silent on me....

mikeathome

XP Media Center '02 - SP2

Start | Help and Support
type "initialize disk" in the Search pane
Beneath "Overviews, Articles and Tutorials"
expand the link "Volume status descriptions"
Click " + Unknown "
Read the text, click on the "Troubleshooting" link.
Follow the Troubleshooting instructions

From your description of events it's hard (if not impossible) to tell just what happened when you inadvertently attempted to boot to that HDD. (We're assuming that the drive just contained data and not an operating system). Why the data on that disk (there *was* uncorrupted/potentially accessible data on that disk, right?) would have been lost because of that incident is a mystery.

You can try one or more so-called data recovery programs to try to resurrect the data on that HDD, but you'll be very, very lucky if that's successful. Most likely a data recovery service will be needed to recover the data. Nearly needless to say that's a very expensive proposition and there's no guarantee of data recovery even there.

Here's a sample of some of the available data recovery programs.

Recover Lost Data - http://www.stompsoft.com/recoverlostdata.html

Executive Software Undelete -http://www.undelete.com/undelete/undelete.asp

Scaven - http://pjwalczak.com/scaven/index.php

Ontrack Data Recovery - http://www.ontrack.com/

R-Tools Technology - http://www.r-tt.com/

BadCopy - http://www.jufsoft.com/badcopy/

CD Data Rescue - http://www.naltech.com/

PC Inspector File Recovery -
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

Active UNDELETE (http://www.active-undelete.com/)

Data Recovery Wizard (http://www.easeus.com/download.htm)

IRecover NTFS http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/irecover.htm

TestDisk - http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk (free)

File Scavenger - http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm

http://aumha.org/a/recover.php

Many, if not all, of these programs have demo versions available for download.

One other thing...
It probably won't work but it's worth a shot...
If you have another PC available to you - install the problem HDD on that machine and see if you can access it through that means.

Try running TestDisk <http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk> on the
problem disk.

Thanks. Testdisk worked to get me access to my data. I still haven't been able to get the disk to function as a disk, but testdisk through DOS gave me a view of the folders and let me copy the data off to another HDD with no losses.

Appreciate the help.