External drive no longer appears....

Hi,
I downloaded trial version of TI as its been highly recommended.

I have a laptop with an 80gig hard drive and just bought a 300gig external hard drive to use for back-ups and additional storage.

My challenge is that before i used TI, I had the external drive appearing as drives E and F (I had it partitioned into two at the computer shop).

Rightly or wrongly, I used the "Add new hard disk" function and now I no longer have my external drive appearing in "My Computer" in any shape or form. I only have my internal hard drive and my DVD drive showing.

I have been reading the manual and looking at the KNowledge Forum but so far without much luck so far.

My ultimate goal is to have a full backup of my entire laptop hard disk on my new external drive (including programs, folders, files, settings, emails, etc) and to do this say twice a week...and to also be able to do some additional mini back-ups of a smaller number of files at a time.

But now with my external drive seemingly AWOL, I'm kind of stuck.

Appreciate any input and thanks in advance,
Ivan

 

Yes, that was a wrong move to "add new hard drive". TI would have seen it, since it was already formatted and partitioned.

I hope you didn't lose any data from it.

Can you get Windows to format it and partition it once more? If not, it should have come with a cd containing formatting utilities, which should do the job.

Once you get it partitoned, create the bootable TI Rescue cd, boot form it and use the Image backup feature to make a backup of the laptop drive on to the external.

 

" ... and now I no longer have my external drive appearing in "My Computer""

Does it show up in Disk Management?

 

Thanks for the prompt response guys. Much appreciated.

To answer your questions, No…..I didn’t lose any data as I had a DVD back-up of the few files I had initially placed there "just in case".

And yes, the external drive seems to be showing up in “Disk Management”. I’ve just been Googling and found a suggestion to go there. I’m sure there’s a logical answer and probably a simple one too, but why does it show up there and not as a drive in “My Computer”?

Anyway, is there a simple way to Reformat the drive from within the Disk Management area? I’ve only done it from within “My computer” and this seems totally different.

 

Simply right click on the drive graphic or text description and select "Format..." from the pop-up window.

 

" ... but why does it show up there and not as a drive in “My Computer”?"

It may not show up if there's been no drive letter assigned to it. That you can also do in Disk Management.

 

Hi ... Your external drive runs on usb , Is this connect ? Also what do you see in the devise manager area ? Any yellow exclamation mark ?

 

Do NOT Format the drive, at least not yet.

Go into the Disk Manager and see whether you can assign drive letters to each of the partitions on the drive.

If you previously did not clobber things, you may be able to get things back.

 

Thanks guys.....again, very much appreciated.

I've got my drive back and recreated the drive letters so all is great. So now back to square 1 and looking to back-up my whole hard drive from square 1, including OS and programs.

 

Glad to hear you're at least "back to square 1". The thing with laptops, unless you buy another laptop drive to test the Restore feature (and you should really do a Restore), there is no other way to be sure the Restore will be successful unless you do it on the original drive. This I don't recommend at all, since, if the Restore fails, you will be "up the creek".

 

You can use the following programs to develop confidence that the backup matches the files on the hard drive.

http://www.standards.com/index.html?CompareDrives
http://www.standards.com/index.html?GetFileTypeDistribution