Allocating a disc without loosing data

[Tegneren]

I just took a hard drive out of the external drive enclosure and put it in my media pc, but it then shows up as "unallocated" in disc management.

Is it safe to allocate it to a new volume without loosing the data on it?

If not, is there a easy way to get the data from it. Its nothin really important, but annoying to loose it.

it's 1 TB WD Green HDD

[Biohazard777]

24 minutes ago, Tegneren said:

Is it safe to allocate it to a new volume without loosing the data on it?

No

 

24 minutes ago, Tegneren said:

I just took a hard drive out of the external drive enclosure and put it in my media pc, but it then shows up as "unallocated" in disc management.
If not, is there a easy way to get the data from it. Its nothin really important, but annoying to loose it.

Have you tried putting it back into the enclosure? Does it still show up as "unallocated"?

There is lots of recovery software out there you can try, some even free... but if you aren't careful about what you are doing you can easily permanently fk up the data.
So before going down that route, can you please explain what was the enclosure and drive used for originally, how you got to where you are now, what kind of partition table and file system you had on it etc.
 

[Tegneren]

7 hours ago, Biohazard777 said:

No

 

Have you tried putting it back into the enclosure? Does it still show up as "unallocated"?

There is lots of recovery software out there you can try, some even free... but if you aren't careful about what you are doing you can easily permanently fk up the data.
So before going down that route, can you please explain what was the enclosure and drive used for originally, how you got to where you are now, what kind of partition table and file system you had on it etc.
 

I haven tried putting it back in the external enclosure as it was a hassle to get out, and its firmly mounted in my case now.

It was just a normal external drive(WD My book 1TB) that i used in most parts just used for storing totallysuperlegalnotatallpirated movies and series, most of which i can easily find again. There might have been some bacup of old "my documents" etc. but I think I have that backed up in cloud storage. So its nothing mission critical.

 

I did the same thing with another Packard Bell external drive, and that was just plug-and-play

 

[Biohazard777]

21 minutes ago, Tegneren said:

I haven tried putting it back in the external enclosure as it was a hassle to get out, and its firmly mounted in my case now.

It was just a normal external drive(WD My book 1TB) that i used in most parts just used for storing totallysuperlegalnotatallpirated movies and series, most of which i can easily find again. There might have been some bacup of old "my documents" etc. but I think I have that backed up in cloud storage. So its nothing mission critical.

 

I did the same thing with another Packard Bell external drive, and that was just plug-and-play

 

Yeah it should be plug & play.
Thought you might have used the drive for cable provided smart box or something like that, which could format your drive in such a way Windows doesn't recognize the partition table or file system. 
Anyhow, since the data isn't that important you can try running TestDisk , and recover lost partitions (since all you see is "unallocated"). Be very careful when you reach disk selection, don't accidentally select the wrong disk heh. Btw what is the size of the unallocated (full 1 TB or something smaller)?

[Tegneren]

5 minutes ago, Biohazard777 said:

Yeah it should be plug & play.
Thought you might have used the drive for something like cable provided smart box or something like that, which could format your drive in such a way Windows doesn't recognize the partition table or file system. 
Anyhow, since the data isn't that important you can try running TestDisk , and recover lost partitions (since all you see is "unallocated"). Be very careful when you reach disk selection, don't accidentally select the wrong disk heh. Btw what is the size of the unallocated (full 1 TB or something smaller)?

Yes, its the full TB, and shows as only one partition on the disk.

 

Come to think of it, I may have f'ed it up already. When I opened Disc Manager it notified me of the new drive and asked me to choose between MBR and GPT where i selected GPT as it was the default choice. Does this matter in this case and if so is there a way to change it to MBR?

[Biohazard777]

1 hour ago, Tegneren said:

Come to think of it, I may have f'ed it up already. When I opened Disc Manager it notified me of the new drive and asked me to choose between MBR and GPT where i selected GPT as it was the default choice. Does this matter in this case and if so is there a way to change it to MBR?

Yep that would do it.
You can give TestDisk a spin and try to recover the original.
In any case, whatever you do, it shouldn't be done on the HDD that was fked up. You should make an image of the disk and then try the recovery on that image... Two potential problems with that approach:
1) HDDs are kinda slow.
2) Free space. 1TB messed up drive means you need 1TB free space on your PC for the image plus another 1TB free space for recovered files.
If the data isn't important I would just yolo it directly on that messed up HDD and if it succeeds - great, if it doesn't I'd just format it and re-download stuff.
 

[Tegneren]

9 minutes ago, Biohazard777 said:

Yep that would do it.
You can give TestDisk a spin and try to recover the original.
In any case, whatever you do, it shouldn't be done on the HDD that was fked up. You should make an image of the disk and then try the recovery on that image... Two potential problems with that approach:
1) HDDs are kinda slow.
2) Free space. 1TB messed up drive means you need 1TB free space on your PC for the image plus another 1TB free space for recovered files.
If the data isn't important I would just yolo it directly on that messed up HDD and if it succeeds - great, if it doesn't I'd just format it and re-download stuff.
 

Thanks, I think I will just try to recover directly