I pulled a hard drive from a computer that I couldn't get to work and installed it in an external enclosure and connected it to a working computer (to pull the data off the drive before I did anything drastic). The USB Mass Storage Device shows up under Device Manager as working properly but Disk Management shows the hard drive to be unallocated. How can I access the data? If I partition it, won't it wipe the disk clean?Thanks for any helpful suggestions.B1 person needs an answerI do too

I pulled a hard drive from a computer that I couldn't get to work and installed it in an external enclosure and connected it to a working computer (to pull the data off the drive before I did anything drastic). The USB Mass Storage Device shows up under Device Manager as working properly but Disk Management shows the hard drive to be unallocated. How can I access the data? If I partition it, won't it wipe the disk clean?Thanks for any helpful suggestions.BIt sounds as if the partition table has become corrupted. There are several applications that purport to fix partition tables, some free and some not. I haveAcronis Disk Director , and although I haven't used it for this particular purpose, Acronis disk manipulation tools are generally very reliable.

I found one free partition tool that had a recover partition feature. I can now see the disk so it seems to have worked. Can I assume the corrupt partition table would keep it from booting and if I put the hard drive back it should boot fine now?

I found one free partition tool that had a recover partition feature. I can now see the disk so it seems to have worked. Can I assume the corrupt partition table would keep it from booting and if I put the hard drive back it should boot fine now?Not necessarily. I was considering it as a non-boot disk (which it was when you had it in the external enclosure).You can try, but there may be other parts of the Master Boot Record that were corrupted. These generally can be corrected using native Windows tools from the Windows Recovery Console. The one you want is probably FIXMBR. You'd be wise to back up the data to some other place temporarily.http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058

Well you were right - it would not boot. But I found the manufacturer's menu and was able to clear the partition table and master boot record and get to the system recovery program. And thanks for the response - it's nice to know there are knowlegeable people out there willing to help when you get frustrated working on windows ____.