# External HDD Shows "Unknown Partition"



## Calibretto (Sep 28, 2009)

Hey Guys. I got a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Go external HDD and when I plugged it in one day, it did not show up in My Computer. I went to Disk Management and it showed there as "Healthy (Unknown Partition)". What does this mean? It's never happened to me before. Any ideas on how to fix this and can my files be recovered?


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## kimsland (Sep 28, 2009)

Usually the Hard drive will be ok, but the external box may have faulted
Try removing the Hard drive (if you can get into the external box) and mounting the hard drive inside a working PC


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## superldg (Sep 29, 2009)

Download this and scan for lost files. If still nothing, try on a different PC.


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## Motoxrdude (Sep 29, 2009)

Well, it depends. Have you used the drive before? If not, it could simply be formatted using a different format that's unfamiliar to windows, ie one native for linux of macs. If you dont have anything important on the drive, I would try formatting it to NTFS and go from there.


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## Calibretto (Sep 29, 2009)

Motoxrdude said:


> Well, it depends. Have you used the drive before? If not, it could simply be formatted using a different format that's unfamiliar to windows, ie one native for linux of macs. If you dont have anything important on the drive, I would try formatting it to NTFS and go from there.


I ended up just reformatting the drive to NTFS. It was being used on a Mac for a few months and it all of a sudden just did this.


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## Motoxrdude (Sep 30, 2009)

Yeah, windows pretty much can't recognize any file formats except for NTFS and FAT, so that was probably your issue.


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