I had a spare internal HD so I decided to give Suse a try. I forgot to disconnect my 500gig USB external drive when I did the install. I don’t know what happened but some how it got messed up by Suse. I installed Suse to the internal drive and it boots and works fine. Here is where the problem comes in. When I remove my Suse HD and put back in my Win XP HD the USB external drive can’t be seen in My Computer. It’s in the device manager but not in My Computer. That means I can’t access it. I have over a 1000 photo’s of my family on that drive that I can’t get to. I tried the USB drive on my laptop and it loads the driver but it doesn’t show up in My Computer. The drive worked perfectly until I loaded Suse. Is my USB drive now a paper weight? How can I get it to work again. Please HELP me. My wife will kill me if I tell her all the family photos are gone.
tonyespo adjusted his/her AFDB on Saturday 30 May 2009 15:16 to write:
>
> I had a spare internal HD so I decided to give Suse a try. I forgot to
> disconnect my 500gig USB external drive when I did the install. I don’t
> know what happened but some how it got messed up by Suse. I installed
> Suse to the internal drive and it boots and works fine. Here is where
> the problem comes in. When I remove my Suse HD and put back in my Win XP
> HD the USB external drive can’t be seen in My Computer. It’s in the
> device manager but not in My Computer. That means I can’t access it. I
> have over a 1000 photo’s of my family on that drive that I can’t get to.
> I tried the USB drive on my laptop and it loads the driver but it
> doesn’t show up in My Computer. The drive worked perfectly until I
> loaded Suse. Is my USB drive now a paper weight? How can I get it to
> work again. Please HELP me. My wife will kill me if I tell her all the
> family photos are gone.
>
>
What happens if you put the SSE drive back in and try and boot without the
usb drive connected?
also what happens when you boot with the usb drive in and the SuSE one?
I want to see if maybe you wrote grub to the usb drive and so you might be
able to get all back but need to know the results of the two steps above.
HTH
Mark
Nullus in verba
Nil illegitimi carborundum
The first thing I would do is try to find out if your original NTFS partition is still there, and that you didn’t overwrite it!
I would either boot the openSUSE liveCD (if you have it), or put the spare hard disk back in and boot into openSUSE.
Once in suse, plug the USB drive in.
Then open a terminal (you can find that on the main menu), and type the following:
sudo su
…and enter the password that you selected on installation.
fdisk -l
If you can’t understand all the text, I would suggest copying it and pasting it here for someone else to advise you further.
DO NOT play around with partition recovery tools or undelete programmes yet, you risk losing everything permanently if you make any more changes!
Thanks for the replies. I was able to use Herens Boot disc to recover my files and USB drive. I am back to using Win XP and I will leave Linux Suse for you experts. I can’t understand why anyone would want an OS that requires so much work to get working properly. It just doesn’t have the drivers and the click to install features that windows does. Everyone, Good Luck with your OS of choice and again thanks for the replies.
Tony
Glad you got it all back!
Some free advice, however unwanted:
-
Don’t keep thousands of photos on a drive without backing them up. Ever. If you do, expect to lose them.
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You wouldn’t buy a hammer, wander around your house idly swinging it around, then come back to the tool shop and say “Your hammer broke my television!”, would you?
