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[ILikeToast]

My brother was using my hard drive on our Vista PC to watch a video on the VLC media player which were both stored on the hard drive. He reported that the video stopped playing, VLC crashed, and the hard drive lights started flashing for a few moments before they turned off entirely. When the hard drive lights turned off, he went back to "computer" and looked for my two partitions, but they were not there. The lights were still off as it was plugged in, and I later disconnected the hard drive and plugged it into my XP laptop. The laptop recognized a device was plugged into the usb port and my hard drive whirred for a while and one dot light and a bar light turned on. There was no automatic "open folder" prompt and there are still no partitions to be seen under "my computer." After looking for other's feedback on this issue, I went to "disk management" under "computer managment" to view my partitions and there shows only one partition under "Disk 1" that is 2794.52 GB and is my hard drive. I had set up two partitions formatted under NTFS with 1.36 TB allocated to each of them. There is personal data on this hard drive that is extremely crucial to me as you might imagine and I can't afford to lose it. Is there any way to access my data or is it completely lost? I have had this hard drive for about a month and have been very satisfied with its performance until now. It was purchased from Costco and is the Backup Plus Desktop Drive model. Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

[kenji57]

Have a look at this thread 

Hope that helps and you get your data back, but if there is personal data on this hard drive that is extremely crucial to you then it is important to keep a backup. External drives are much more prone to failure or corruption (or getting lost or stolen) than internal drives, so it is a really bad idea to have important stuff only on an external drive.

[ILikeToast]

Thank you for the fast reply. I will keep in mind to keep a backup once I afford one with sufficient capacity. 

[ILikeToast]

The problem has been solved to an extent with one issue. My hard drive will show up on a Windows Vista or Windows 7 PC but not my laptop with XP. It is relieving that all of my data is intact and the drive can function, but is there a way for it to appear uner "my computer" on my laptop? I am still searching for similar topics of this nature to find a solution from. 

[kenji57]

Try fixing the filesystem errors with chkdsk http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265

run chkdsk from command prompt

[fzabkar]

@ILikeToast, I don't understand how you started with two partitions, then ended up with a single partition ... with all your data still intact. What happened in between???

Could we see the partition table and boot sector(s) with Microsoft's Sector Inspector?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

If you extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file, then this will generate a report file named SIout.txt.