External Hard Drives Not Appearing In My Computer

KillerWatt

youngone90 wrote: »

So will this wipe any data that was on them?

There isn't any accessible data on them because they aren't partitioned or formatted.

youngone90

KillerWatt wrote: »

There isn't any accessible data on them because they aren't partitioned or formatted.

Thanks for all your help. Do you know how that might have happened? How can they go from in use and full of data to unformatted as if they've never been used?

KillerWatt

youngone90 wrote: »

Thanks for all your help. Do you know how that might have happened? How can they go from in use and full of data to unformatted as if they've never been used?

Either your brother intentionally removed the partition while he had it, or the drive suffered some form of corruption along the way.

clinteestwood

are you sure you are using a usb2 cable? if not it might not be transmitting from one to the other correctly.

davb

It's unusual for 2 drives to have the same problem like that. If there were files on the disks that you would prefer to recover, then I would investigate further before creating new partitions etc.
Have you tried connecting to another computer, sometimes things will read on one and not another. Do you know if the original PC these were connected to was Windows, or some sort of Linux. It could also have been encrypted as was previously mentioned - if the whole drive was encrypted with something like Truecrypt, I doubt you would see any partitions - but without the password you would have no chance of accessing it.

clinteestwood

Actually, davb makes an interesting point... there is also a chance that the hdd's are formatted using a linux file system and windows wont mount it because of that! in which case, you would have to install something like DiskInternal Linux which as far as i know can read (not sure if it can right to) a linux file system

stmartinsdiver

There is another possibility - I have a number of external USB connected drives. One of them, requires a special split USB cable.
One end plugs into the HDD housing but the other two USB connections plug into the PC USB ports.
The reason for this is a single USB port cannot supply enough power. If I plug this in with a single USB cable, the system sees the drive and it looks like it is powered up but nothing is visible when looking at the drive contents.
It's just a thought and may not apply in your case, but perhaps worth checking if a twin connection is required.