My issue is with my external hard drive, which was doing fine until not so long ago. It stores 200 GB, and is a good old 3,5" (I took it from my previous desktop, and put it into an external case that has a USB interface).
This hard drive has 2 partitions, and in December, I thought I'd rename one of the partitions (without changing anything else). I then moved some files around from one partition to the other, and at some point the partition I had renamed went rogue: Windows cannot access it anymore.
The other partition is fine, all files are in place and can be accessed normally. The first partition exists: Windows can see it's there, but not recognize its name, nor access any content. I tried a tool that looked into the file structure of the partition and recognized that the folders were there, so I assume that those file are still there, but Windows can't get there.
My hunch is that something happened to the "name" of the partition, and now Windows can't access the rest of the files.
Is there a tool I can use to "rebuild" the 'heading' of the partition? If possible, I'd rather not lose the contents of that partition by reformatting it.
In summary, I need a hard drive partition tool or something like that that could fix whatever went wrong with the partition.
Thanks in advance for the advice.
Best Answer
If you can see the partition then I assume you can rename the partition like you did before. Try renaming it to something you know Windows can access.
If that doesn't work then you may have some corrupted sectors in the partition table. There are recovery programs which can deal with this but they are generally expensive. The "easiest" option may be to download a Linux live CD (a version of linux which runs directly off the CD) in hopes of being able to access the drive using some recovery tools.
The Cent OS live cd has some recovery features http://www.livecdlist.com/centos