USB backup drive lost

[dlbeaty]

After purchasing the x32 I first installed the backup software "Retrospect Backup" which came with the drive. Then as I have done previously, backed up the entire drive to a folder on the drive. Backup was successful.

Today I attached the drive to copy some folders and the drive did not show up in My computer. However, Disk Management shows a drive with the main area as unallocated, and another partition labeled IBM service, I think it was about 8 Gb.

Actually I did not expect the hidden partition to be copied, but in no way did I expect to lose all my backups!

So far, no utilities I have can find the drive at all. Anyone heard of this situation?

[sjthinkpader]

It is not clear whether you are using one drive or two drives. It will be helpful if you can restate your problem specifying which drive is which.

[dlbeaty]

It is not clear whether you are using one drive or two drives. It will be helpful if you can restate your problem specifying which drive is which.

Thanks for responding. I do need to start over now because I think I know what happened. I am not sure if I had a second drive in the ultrabay at the time, but I first backed up the entire 40 Gb factory loaded XP drive to my Laicie 750 Gb USB drive.

Later, with another Hitachi 40 Gb drive in the ultrabay, I ran IBM Rapid Restore. There was an option then to create a backup on another HD, so I ran it, thinking it had found the drive in the drive bay.

The backup failed. I forget what the message was. I am thinking now that it was trying to backup to the USB drive, which was formatted to fat32. It must have still been connected and I forgot about it.

My Computer does not see the drive, but Disk Management sees the first 700 Gb as unallocated, and then the IBM_Service partition with no drive letter.

On a Windows 98 system I was able to assign a drive number to it but it then says in My Computer that the drive is not formatted. What do I do now? I have backups of many digital photos and other files that I do not remember. I hate to lose all that data.

[sjthinkpader]

If the FAT table had been lost, there are many software that can rebuild the FAT table and recover the files. I used a freeware called FINDPART to do that.
http://www.partitionsupport.com/utilities.htm
FINDPART is not easy to use but here are commercial software other had used before. Do a search on this forum or in the T4x forum.

[dlbeaty]

If the FAT table had been lost, there are many software that can rebuild the FAT table and recover the files. I used a freeware called FINDPART to do that.
http://www.partitionsupport.com/utilities.htm
FINDPART is not easy to use but here are commercial software other had used before. Do a search on this forum or in the T4x forum.

Thanks for the tip. I have found a demo of Active@Partition that found the files, but it will cost $40. to get the files back. Findpart looks too confusing to me, and Testdisk looks tricky as well. I found no information that these apps will work with usb drives under Windows like Active@Partition.

Any other free or cheaper versions out there? I could not find any help in this forum searching for "partition" or "rebuild." What should I search for?

[sjthinkpader]

...Thanks for the tip. I have found a demo of Active@Partition that found the files, but it will cost $40. to get the files back. Findpart looks too confusing to me, and Testdisk looks tricky as well. I found no information that these apps will work with usb drives under Windows like Active@Partition...

I lost a drive once and it cost the company a few thousand dollars to recovery the files. When I used Findpart to recover another drive, I submitted a small donation and Sven helped me with the software.

So no, $40 is not excessive in getting your data back.

[dlbeaty]

I lost a drive once and it cost the company a few thousand dollars to recovery the files. When I used Findpart to recover another drive, I submitted a small donation and Sven helped me with the software.

So no, $40 is not excessive in getting your data back.

Agreed. In this case the data is only a backup of mostly unimportant data. I was able to recover some directories that I was unsure about with EASEUS Partition Master. I like the idea of copying them to another drive rather than editing the damaged partition.

OTOH, you need another large drive if you need to copy the whole disk.

Thanks so much for pointing me in the right direction. I was not sure if this was some special situation related to Thinkpad Rapid Recovery software.

Dan