Hard Drive (with data on it) not detected

Hey everybody,

I spent some time reading through the threads here for a solution to my problem, and many people had a similar issue but I found no resolve as of yet.

For my job I was sent a hard drive (a Samsung HM320JX) with some video files on it. It arrived today, and when I plug the drive in, nothing comes up on my computer.

I have gone into Disk management and clicked "initialize disk" and now it just says the drive is unallocated, and I can't do anything more except create a partition, and I don't think that would solve anything.

Can you help? I would greatly appreciate it!

I'm using Vista Home premium 64 bit.

Thank you,

John

How did you "plug it in"? Did you use an external USB enclosure? That's what I would have used. Connecting it internally is not guaranteed.

It's an external mobile hard drive, with no power supply, and it connects via USB.

Also, I should add that I have experienced this problem on several computers (all PC).

Do you know for sure that the people who sent the drive to you actually checked the data before they sent it. The only other thing I would try is connect it to a Unix box & boot it.

On second thought, tell them to resend the data on another drive.

I talked to them about it and they said they tested it before it went out. They were on a Mac, but supposedly reformatted to NTFS. Something went wrong there I assume, so I guess I'll probably just send it back.

What else could be wrong? Thanks for getting back to me.

It's their problem. If they changed it to NTFS after the loaded the file, forget about it. Send the drive back to them.

To me that reads they deleted all the data. That is why all you can do is create partitions.

Thanks for all your help. I'll talk to the guy about this and send it back.

On a related note - what's the best way to transfer 90GB of files from mac to PC over distance- sending a hard drive? if so, what's the general process? FTP seems like it would be too slow.

I know that may be asking too much given the forum topic but it's worth a shot.

Thanks again!

You aren't asking too much but I don't know anything about Macs.