Running Windows 7 I unplugged the USB from the PC which my external HDD drive was connected too. Google lists a million and one softwares claiming to restore data but I have feeling it's something simple like the filesystem is damaged.

Gparted, when booted up shows the drive as nothing, it won't list size and filesystem type is unknown...

all my family photo's are on there, help me please?

Thanks arco, I've used recuva in the past and it works a treat. My problem is I suspect recovering 1TB of data will take some time and at this point would like to know exactly what happened and how to fix it rather that using an app to do it for me.

ATM I'm researching it and will use an app as last resort.

It must be some thing really simple...does every disk have a MBR? and if so could this be my problem?

If all HDD's don't have MBR's where is the data stored relating to the drive?

Hard to say what's caused it. Could be some sort of malfunctioning of the drive, or just one of those unfortunate things that can happen. You can try to use the repair option when booting from the Win7 DVD, and see if it can fix it.

All hard drives with partitions on them have a MBR. It holds the drives partition table info.

How does the disk look like in Win7's Disk Management? Is it totally empty, or listed as a RAW disk?

...Ok - Here goes

* Comes home from work and decides it's easyer to take the USB drive into the kitchen and pull the files straight off rather than over the network.

* Plugs the drive into Vista and nothing happens.Nothing "is not formatted, you've been screwed".

* Panics

* Boots up Gparted live CD

* Boots up BartPE

* Boots up Linux

* Nothing

* goes onto LFS forum asks for help

* reads up about MBR's and all the little things that go wrong

* scans the MBR's with half dozen scanners for two hours

* Downloads recuva, runs it, it crashes.

* opens disk management and see's that description of the drive

* Epic face palm

...Well

All I can say is...




























Bitlocker sure is one mighty security feature.

Ooookayy!

At least you learned something new today.