In some disaster scenarios, the superblock (the first sector of the HD24 drive) is overwritten or otherwise corrupted. If this happens, HD24tools will be unable to find the drive signature that identifies it as HD24 drive, and as such will be unable to auto-detect the presence of such a drive.
Note that an undetected drive does not always indicate superblock corruption; drive detection may also fail when HD24tools does not have sufficient privileges to access the drive. For example, under Windows Vista and up, this may be the case when the program is not run as Administrator. To tell the difference, see if the drive is detected by the HD24 recorder. If a HD24 recorder detects the drive properly and HD24tools does not, you are most likely facing a permissions problem.
If your HD24 drive is not detected, you may have more success by manually specifying which drive to use. This is done by providing HD24tools with the device name of the drive to use.
If you choose File->Recovery->Select device..., you will see a drop-down box which lists all drives that HD24tools has detected in your system. How do we know which one (if any) is the HD24 drive? The following pages will help clear this up.
Finally, a tip from a HD24tools user: If neither your PC nor HD24 recognizes the drive as valid HD24 drive, you can perform a Quickformat (but absolutely not a long format!!) in the HD24 recorder. A quickformat will write a new superblock to the drive, but but does not touch the audio area.Quickformat re-initializes the project- and song areas and song allocation information on the drive as well. Because of this this workaround is NOT RECOMMENDED for drives containing lots of songs, as useful recovery information may be lost. For drives containing a single long live recording, a quickformat is a possible and realistic workaround, when you don't manage to figure out the HD24 device name using the procedure outlined on the following pages.