Bought LaCie Desktop 1TB external drive (to act as a backup while doing a clean format on two internal drives to get rid of a few issues like locked files...)
I usually always do own format of drives, over the formatting options/programs that usually come along external drives (not sure if it's wise, but I rather get rid of any bloat, as long as it does the storage is enough...)
The disk came with partitions, for mac and pc, in order to give a choice which one to choose (when first clicking the icon in "My Computer" it asks how to format it).
As usual I went to Disk Management to format the whole disk to ntfs, unfortunately weren't paying attention and formatted the 10MB FAT partition to ntfs (just wondered how fast it went...). Only noticed it when trying to copy a large file directory from a secondary internal to it and it gave a warning that it was already full.
So went back to Disk Management and made the second big mistake; managed to delete all partitions on it, with the results that now it was visible in neither "My Computer" or Disk Management (still visible in Device Manager though...)
Tried to use Testdisk to do a diagnosis/recovery, but so far haven't had much success, but once I'm done with the backup/cleaning of the internal disks (used an older backup drive) I'll try it again just in case I could figure it out...
Is there an easy (or hard) way of getting the drive back to life, or did I screw it with too many mistakes?
System: Windows XP SP3 Home 32bit, drive in question with usb connection
There is an easy way (not the smartest) and the long way.
Easy way would be to rip the external apart and hook it up to the board internally then run a windows installtion through it, Vista is the easiest at present. That will create a partion and make the drive NTFS.
(Alternatively you can leave it together, but will need to use an XP installation as i think Vista will say no to installing on an external/USB drive)
The long way would be to go get yourself an ultimate boot disk off the net (torrent) and boot from that before the computer starts. (Enter BIOS/ Boot from CD etc)
It will use 50mb (or there abouts) of your RAM as space to boot. Then use the partition tools to diagnose, partition, recover etc.
If you'd like a link to a nice Boot disk torrent i can provide but not in this thread. PM Me.
