External Drive Formatted, Restore Help

[Gelion]

Hey guys, its been a while

I wonder if anyone could help me with my external drive. Its a WD drive that I formatted trying to create a system backup. The USB port recognises it, but it doesn't show up on Windows Explorer. I have a similar drive in working condition I could use to create an "image" that I could transfer to the broken drive, but I do not know how to do it.

Do you think it is worth the effort? I tried looking for a solution online, but most of them deal with data lost on external drives.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Im not sure what OS got. Does it show up in disk management if you use Windows. You go to Computer/My Computer right click and click Manage. Sometimes it shows up there.

 

[Turner]

What OS are you running?

 

[Mise]

How did you format it?

 

[Gelion]

What OS are you running?

Windows Vista. I have XP I could also try, but that computer is really slow.

How did you format it?

That was fun. IIRC I used a third party program to create an image of the system in order to reinstall it later (I think an internal hard drive was damaged). That required me to format a drive (which I did), but the copying itself failed. I'm left with a drive that shows up only in USB manager ever since.

Im not sure what OS got. Does it show up in disk management if you use Windows. You go to Computer/My Computer right click and click Manage. Sometimes it shows up there.

I just did that, it doesn't show up under "Disk Management"...

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

If you put in a Linux Live Disc, does it show up then? Sometimes it does/

 

[Gelion]

If you put in a Linux Live Disc, does it show up then? Sometimes it does/

I don't really see how it can help.... The problem with the defective hard disk was "solved", so right now I am trying to restore the external drive. I thought it could be done by copying files from a working WD external drive or by somehow reverting the formatting that I did.

 

[Turner]

Download an iso for GPartEd, you can use that to 'format' the drive NTFS. Then you should be able to mount it to a Vista box and actually format it. Then copy the stuff back over.

 

[Gelion]

Download an iso for GPartEd, you can use that to 'format' the drive NTFS. Then you should be able to mount it to a Vista box and actually format it. Then copy the stuff back over.

Thank you! I'll try this over the weekend If I format the drive that way will I have to add some sort of "system files" to make it work? I think that the current problem is that those files were formatted...

 

[Turner]

Are you going to boot off of it? If not, then you shouldn't need too.

 

[Gelion]

Are you going to boot off of it? If not, then you shouldn't need too.

Perhaps I was wrong in mentioning a hard drive problem earlier . I want to restore an WD external drive to its original condition. I have a second one in perfect working order. I don't know if the second one can be used to "restore" the first and, if yes, I am not sure how to do it.

 

[Turner]

I've done thousands of images over an existing hard drive, and as long as the image is of the original it shouldn't be much of a problem. Done it to "fix" hard drives with errors on it, and overlaid the image (sometimes of drives with hardware errors) to a 'clean' drive.... Should be okay. Sometimes I've fixed errors on there too by doing this... iffy on that though.

There are a bunch of freeware/shareware imaging software, go to snapfiles or download.com to check them out.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

This I use myself. But only for floppy disk images. I got an external floppy disk drive. And am in the process of transferring all the old disks to images. But I dont know about hard drive images. Maybe worth look. It both creates and writes image.

 

[Gelion]

Thanks guys! I'll try the programs and see if I can resolve this.