disk director can't see drive over USB ?

I lost a drive yesterday so as a happy True Image customer I got Disk Director. On another computer, with the drive connected over USB, the PC can see the drive as two uninitialized partitions needing formatting. Disk Director does not show the drive at all however, so I can't even try recovering the partitions.

With the bad drive actually installed via IDE ATA, the PC won't even boot, BIOS says it's 3800Gb (obviously wrong), so that's why I need to do it over USB.

Is Disk Director supposed to be able to search for and recover lost partitions over USB ?

 

If the drive won't communicate correctly with the computer when it's actually installed, I doubt it will work correctly via USB.

If the drive has failed, then it probably won't be possible to recover the partitions. Did you have a TI backup of the data in the partitions? Why are you trying to recover a "lost" drive?

Have you tried booting from the rescue cd and seeing if you can access the drive that way? Make sure the USB drive is connected and turned on when you boot the computer.

 

I have a backup from a few weeks ago, but I will have to redo some work if I cannot recover it.

Right-click "My Computer", then "Manage", then "Disk Management"

and it sees it as "Disk 2", and shows drive letter "M:" "128.00 GB Healthy (active)" (but with no file system), and "170.09 Gb Unallocated", and it is a 300Gb drive, so if Disk Management can see it over the USB, then I would think Acronis Disk Director ought to be able to see it as well.

 

Are you running DD in Windows or from the rescue cd? If you've only tried in Windows, try the rescue cd and see if it shows anything.

The full mode from the rescue cd uses Linux drivers and may see the drive differently. If your computer is new enough and the BIOS supports USB drives directly you could also try the safe mode and see if that works.

 

Good suggestion, thanks.

Safe mode DD from the CD doesn't see the drive.

Full mode shows a blue splash screen, switches to a black screen with Acronis logo and "loading, please wait" and it hangs there for about a minute with flashing white cursor. Then another blue splash screen for about a half second and the PC reboots.

I made the CD twice, first directly from DD, the second by having DD create an .iso and then burning the CD from another utility, but I don't see any difference in the behavior of both CDs.

 

Since the safe mode of DD uses the BIOS to access the drives, it seems that the BIOS of the computer is not detecting the drive correctly. The drive may be shot. Do you have another computer you could try it in? Perhaps a different system would have better luck.

Also, I assume you have the master/slave jumpers set correctly.

Otherwise you will probably want to consider trying some more sophisticated recovery tools, since you want to get your data off. If you didn't care about the data you could try reformatting the drive with Windows Disk Management and see if it is recognized correctly.

 

I think the computer can see it just fine, from previous message...

".....Right-click "My Computer", then "Manage", then "Disk Management"

and it sees it as "Disk 2", and shows drive letter "M:" "128.00 GB Healthy (active)" (but with no file system), and "170.09 Gb Unallocated", and it is a 300Gb drive, so if Disk Management can see it over the USB, then I would think Acronis Disk Director ought to be able to see it as well......"

 

Well I had the same problem you did with a 160GB HDD.
I used the Disk Director I bought today to attempt a recovery of the drive

If your system sees the drive but nothing can access it, and Disk Manager sees it as an active healthy partition but can not determine the formatting it is safe to say the drive is shot. Probably the boot sector is so far gone.

On mine the Boot sector had so many bad sectors in a row nothing could be done with it. not even Disk director could attempt to recover so many bad sectors. I even tried to reformat the drive but the formating would fail.

Sorry to be the bringer of Bad news, but your drive is to far gone.
May it Rest In Peace.