External hard drive issue

[Ginginho]

I have a Buffalo 1TB portable hard drive (HD-PNTU3).

I have it plugged into the Xbox 360 as a media host for films and TV.
It works fine, however when I plug it into my laptop it doesn't appear with a drive letter so I cannot access it to add/delete files accordingly.

The PC recognises it, as it's found in Disk Management and Device Manager.

I've done a fair bit of Googling to try and resolve it. I've tried uninstalling all USB drivers, updating the external hard drive driver, tried it in all USB ports on my laptop, but it still doesn't show up.

In Disk Management it doesn't let me change/add a drive letter or path either.

So, i'm stuck.

Any suggestions?

I will take it over my Dads to see if it works on his later today.

Thanks in advance

[Samdy Gray]

Is the external HDD Disk 1?

[Ginginho]

Yeah.

I've read there's sometimes partitioning issues, which, to be honest, is not something I would know how to fix.

[Samdy Gray]

Try this: http://www.howtogeek.com/197296/how-to-use-the-diskpart-utility-to-assign-and-remove-drive-letters/

The volume you want is the partition with your data on.

[Ginginho]

Cheers Sam, although the HDD doesn't show up when I use the list volume function....

[Samdy Gray]

What do you get if you do 'list disk' instead?

Btw, the screenshot suggests you did a bit of playing around with Volume 3. That's your EFI partition which you really don't want to go fucking with. Just a word of caution!

[Ginginho]

Ah, I wrongly assumed that was my External HDD and assigned a letter to it, then removed it.

List disk:

[Samdy Gray]

Weird. The disk is present, but the partition isn't listed as a volume.

Try 'select disk 1'. Then 'list partition'. You're looking for the one that's 259GB in size. Then 'select partition x' where x is the number of the partition, you can then try and mount it by doing 'assign letter' again.

If that doesn't work, it's probably still recoverable but it'd take a bit of tinkering.

[Ginginho]

That didn't work unfortunately, it doesn't let you assign a drive letter from the "list disk" route.

[Ginginho]

Appreciate all your help so far, Samdy.

I installed Ext2 Volume Manager, which found the drive and allowed me to assign a letter.

However, it's now telling me I need to format the drive before I can access it.
This would obviously wipe off everything on it, which I clearly don't want to do.

[Ginginho]

Fuck it, i've formatted it to NTFS and now running Recuva and hoping for the best.

[Samdy Gray]

Noooooo.

You could've easily booted a Linux LiveCD and retrieved the data before formatting.  Never mind.

[Ginginho]

Just tried it, my data is still there.
Will have another look tomorrow to see if I can get it sorted.

Cheers Sam