Once you plug it into your PC, follow these steps: Right-click on My PC—select Manage—then go to Disk Management. You should see the drive listed on the right side. It won't have a letter assigned yet. Right-click it and select Change Drive Letter Assign it a letter, and it should work just fine.
Give this tool a shot https://www.piriform.com/recuva I really hope you have an external drive handy where you can stash those Pictures if they actually show up.
If Recuva fails you, download File Scavenger. It managed to fully Retrieve everything for me when I dealt with the exact same mess—my wife accidentally hit Delete on a bunch of photos.
I’d probably try running the format command through CMD first. If that crashes and bricks the drive, I'm heading straight to the nearest Best Buy to vent my frustrations.
Head straight into the BIOS. You'll need to disable SATA Native Control and switch the setting to Compatibility, or if your menu allows, just toggle from AHCI over to ATA.
While you're in there, make sure you set USB Legacy to Enable.
Alright, let's try this approach. Since you're installing Windows 7 on an external hard drive, just head into your BIOS after you restart and set that specific drive as your primary boot device. Once the installation kicks off from that external drive, you'll be greeted by a menu where you can wipe existing partitions or create entirely new ones based on what you need. The way you currently have everything set up is, frankly, a total disaster.🙂
Set up your partitions now—I’d suggest keeping it simple with just a C: drive for the Windows 7 install—because you can always go back into Windows and use Disk Management to create additional partitions later on.
Don't sweat the drivers too much; Windows 7 will likely handle about 90% of them automatically during the setup process. At most, you might have to manually install the drivers for your graphics card and the chipset.
@TwitterUser, are you actually attempting to install Windows 7 directly from within Windows XP? If that’s the plan, you're already heading for a disaster. When you power on the machine, you need to enter the boot menu and instruct the computer to boot from the CD/DVD containing your Windows 7 installation media. That is the only way you'll get the option to format the drive (or in your case, the partition). What’s the capacity of your hard drive? My advice: set aside a partition of roughly 100GB specifically for the Windows installation and your essential software—Microsoft Office, a PDF reader, and the usual suspects. Leave the rest of the space for your media files and call it a day.
Is it just a black background for you? If so, Microsoft probably realized you're running some knockoff version. Which OS are you even using? A little more info from your end would actually be helpful.
Boot into your BIOS, locate the SATA Mode settings, and switch them from AHCI to either IDE or Compatibility mode. That should clear up those errors right away.
Go ahead and install the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader on your virtual machine. It comes equipped with a built-in virtual printer, which makes saving files directly to PDF a breeze. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/
Enter the BIOS, Disable UEFI, switch the SATA Native Controll to Disable or Compatibility mode, adjust your boot order to prioritize the CD/DVD drive, and save your changes. Reboot the machine, boot from the disc, and you're set—you've probably installed Windows a hundred times by now anyway.