I accidentally deleted the volume on an external drive

Hi, I accidentally deleted the volume on my 3rd hard drive and now my Windows Vista PC won't even recognize the drive. How can I fix this?

The problem started when I put my old Barracuda 160 gig drive in a usb external case and couldn't get it to work until I put the jumpers on 7-8. The problem was, it was asking me to format the drive which was full of files which I wanted to retrieve. Through a series of now obvious mistakes, I first shrunk the volume backwards, I meant to shrink only 50 MB but deleted all but 50 MB and then stupidly deleted the entire volume.

What I need now is to at least be able to have my PC recognize the drive again and to be able to restore the full volume but would ideally like to still be able to retrieve the data, if that's even possible at this point. Also, why does, or did my computer only recognize this drive in the 7-8 jumper configuration? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Tony

Hello Tony, and welcome to Vista Forums.

You might see if the method in the tutorial below may be able to work for this as well to recover it.

Partition - Recover Deleted Partitions in Windows

Hope this helps,
Shawn