Hi guys,

Problem with iomega prestige portable hard drive, it doesn't show as a drive on the pc (it did before).

Tried it on another pc and it doesn't show there either? It has power and the pc beeps when connected buy the drive doesn't show!?

Is it buggered?

Also, the ageing pc needs replacing….

Needs to deal with general home office stuff, photos, iTunes, a bit of video(may be more in future)

Pc or iMac?

PC

Can you see the drive in disk management?
Start>control panel>Admin tools>computer management>Disk management

If you can you may be able to get something off it.

If not you talking about data recovery starting at ~£150.

I've had USB drives that do as you've described. Problem traced to me mapping network drives to other letters immediately concurrent with the physical drives on the machine. i.e – physical drives are assigned letters A: to E: and mapped network drives from F: upwards. As soon as I unmapped F: the USB drive appeared/was usable as it wanted to be the first drive after the physical drives.

Probably not as simple as that if it's on a home PC…..

Hah! It's there, says unrecognised and not initialised…

Initialised and says online now but still not visible?

Hmmm thats good. Not a drive problem then.

I would Download something like PhotoRec get all the files off it and re-format it.

PhotoRec will see the drive even though windows will not mount it.

Ok great. I'll try that once I get home. Hopefully my pc will be the same.

Will post later….,

Cheers.

Is there data on the disk that you need? Just format the bugger if not.

(Moral of this story, take backups, won't anyone think of the children etc etc)

There are a few things I'd like though not much.

As this is the portable hard drive it is the backup 😕

How do you format if it's not visible though?

If it's visible in Disk Manager, is it showing any partitions?

No, it just says 232.88GB unallocated.

Nothing else.

I imagine its a software issue with the disk. PhotoRec will read most file systems and recover what it can. You may be lucky.

Sussex it. Now appears. Will run photorec before I format though.

Thanks all.

It's not major if I can't get what's on it. Most is on the pc still but need to be able to use the drive to move stuff to new computer.

When I decide what that will be of course!

Pc or iMac?

You're just being silly now… 😉

Elfinsafety, how?

Ok back on home pc and the drive is not visible anywhere!!