External hard drive not recognized... Partition table?

[sonic2041]

Actually I believe that $79 is cheap. When I was looking for something for a customer who hadn't been copying data backups off the computer, everything I found was $500 and up a few years ago. That kind of software is really aimed at businesses that have a failure and have failed to follow good backup procedures and will be totally hosed if they can't get the data back.

I agree, it is cheap. If you take it to a professional it costs a lot more than that. We had to recover a RAID volume a while back and had to use the version of the software designed for RAID, and I believe it was a lot more expensive than the NTFS version.

[Ivo]

Just as an update, I decided to format the drive and re-create the backup of the important stuff as soon as I returned back to my main desktop (which had the only other "up to date" version of my important stuff - the failure of the drive happened shortly before my trip to my secondary desktop at which point I would have synced the 2nd desktop to be up to date).

Now I'm thinking about upgrading my backing up solutions - strictly speaking, the current solution has not failed me, but it was still unpleasant being left with only 1 location having the most up to date pictures (I wouldn't lose much, but I don't like losing anything). I'm thinking of getting a RAID or a network drive installed in the same house (but a different) location of my primary desktop. But I'm creating a new thread to discuss that.

Thanks everyone for the help.
TestDisk seemed like a very nice tool for other problems, and I could recommend Get Data Back NTFS (even though I did not buy the full version, the trial let me see the file structure to confirm what I would lose by formatting). I can also recommend the free PC Inspector, which will probably be my first choice whenever I get any other problem that TestDisk won't tackle.

Ivo.