Unallocated HD after moving from eSATA to internal

[dbolt]

I have a fairly new Dell 410 (SP-Pro all updates) with 4 internal SATA drives and one eSATA externall drive connected via eSATA cable. The drives are not part RAID, although boot info says RAID.

The eSATA drive (WD500ys) started to drop out from the list of drives with explorer. That appeared to be due to a loose eSATA cable, because mashing in the cable and rebooting usually fixed the problem.

I exchanged one of the smaller internal SATA (WD320ys) for the larger external 500G and now disk manager now shows the 500G drive as unallocated. Of course explorer does not list the 500g drive. The 320G drive that was formally internal, but now connected via eSATA shows up in
Explorer and is functional . All drives are recognized during bootup and all drives pass the HD test option at bootup. As expected, at bootup the boot drive is listed as Drive0, CDs are D1, 160G drive is D3, WD500ys is D4 and the external WE320ys via eSATA is D5.

How can I recover the info on the 500G drive?

[Overclocked]

Hi dbolt and welcome to HTFC!

Have you run the WD diagnostics (Data Lifeguard Diagnostic) on that disk?

[dbolt]

No, I have not run the WD diagnostics. The drive did pass the test (not sure of name) offered after hitting F12 at boot-up.

I'll run the test you suggest as soon as I return from Round Rock - for non-computer related visit.

Thanks for the suggestion. Good one, too.

I was using the drive to backup images from other PCs and for photo backup storage. I think (but not certain) the data on the unallocated drive probably exists elsewhere, so I could just partition the drive from DM. However, I'd much prefer to identify the problem and a solution. A few months ago I had a similar problem with an USB drive on the same PC.

[Overclocked]

If the disk is failing try some of these free recovery tools:

ADRC Data Recovery
Disk Investigator
PC Inspector
TestDisk

[dbolt]

Thanks again. More good info.

doug

[dbolt]

Update on issue:

I ran some of the tests suggested above and discovered someone who suggested converting the drive from a basic drive to Dynamic drive and listed several advantages over a Basic drive. What appealed to me was the "promise" that the conversion would not destroy any data, so I clicked to convert. Immediately, Disk Man started formatting the drive. So much for saving the data and believing what I read on the Internet.

Anyhow, I have not discovered that I actually lost any data not were not present on another system, and, the drive is behaving as I would expect - no issues.

Thanks for the good links on testing programs.

doug