Hi,
I'm trying to upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 8. I'd like to do a clean install because it's been years since I've formatted my computer and it's having some issues installing updates and seeing external drives. I'd like to back up my data prior to upgrading.
I tried 3 external drives yesterday (2 were friends' and they work on other computers) and they all showed up under disk management but not on my computer. My friends drives had healthy primary partitions. My drive shows up as Unknown and Not Initialised. When I try to initialise it, it gets an error "incorrect function". I've worked out that this means that my disk is corrupt. I'm happy to format it. I'd like to use it to back up my data for the afternoon.
I'm not terribly technical - I've been searching for solutions and have seen lots of others with similar issues on various forums. Most of the answers left me at some point with some assumed knowledge that I clearly don't have!
I copied the instructions somebody else gave to do diskpart. Here are the results:
Disk 1 is now the selected disk.
DISKPART> detail disk
Disk ID: 00000000
Type : USB
Bus : 0
Target : 0
LUN ID : 0
Read-only : No
Boot Disk : No
Pagefile Disk : No
Hibernation File Disk : No
Crashdump Disk : No
There are no volumes.
Is there anything I can do to get my hard drive working again so that I can use it to back up? USB sticks are still working but I can't fit everything on to them.
Thanks,
Grace