Take the 2-minute tour ×

my external hard disk is not showing up in Explorer. In Disk Management, all of the options are grayed out except for "Delete Volume".

I tried right-clicking on the Disk and selecting "Convert to Dynamic Disk", but it returned with error message "The operation is not supported by the object".

Is there anything I can do to access it so I can backup my data?

External HDD is Disk 1

share|improve this question
so there is no data on the external drive? –  Carl B May 13 '13 at 17:06
@CarlB: There is. I tried running Zero Assumption Recovery on it and it does found some data. But the structure is incomplete hence why I prefer to be able to access the HDD the normal way and backup. –  Khairul May 14 '13 at 0:46

1 Answer 1

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Using TestDisk, I discovered that my external HDD had actually been converted to Linux file system. Such a shame that even Windows 8, Disk Management can't at least tell if the hard disk is using a file system created in Mac or Linux.

I managed to back up all of my documents on Windows itself, using DiskInternals Linux.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


