Harddrive emergency!

[Kelsenellenelvian]

Please someone help me. Windows XP I rebooted and the system would not boot tried safe mode no go. So I did a repair installation and now the system boots just fine and windows works as normal.

NOW the big problem: My second drive has dissapeared windows does not show it.

Boot recognizes it, acronise recognizes it as a dynamic volume, same with norton partition magic. Hardware manager shows the dynamic volume and says it is offline??????WTF?????

THE Biggest thing is this **** thing is my secondary drive and has all of my files and work on it. 7 gigs of work and weeks and hours of work gone does any one have an idea how to fix???

[LiquidSage]

Before you try anything

Make a sector by sector image of that partition or HD (i prefer acronis true image 8).

Just about any type of recovery operation attempt will further destroy any chance of recovery if that attempt fails. It is vital that you make an image before trying anything, even chkdsk.

Afterwards try some HD recovery progs such at Acronis Recovery Expert, Winternals Disk Commander, Ontrack EasyRecoveryPro, Restorer 2000 Pro v2.0 chkdsk, even installing a newer OS version sometimes will allow a partition to be revitalized. If one doesn't work, reastore the image and try another.

Failed delayed writes, bad sectors, corrupted file tables, OS selectors, partitioning slip ups are just a few of the wonderful things that could cause this.

[Kelsenellenelvian]

Thanks for the info restorer 2000 pro is working on it now looks like it all is recoverable even if might take 2days worth of cpu cycles.

What is the best check to run on the drive afterwards to check the integrity???

[Astalavista]

can u tell us more about your system?

[brian873]

TestDisk

try this it is very fast at recovery

hail hail

[Kelsenellenelvian]

POS 466 w\2 40 gigs western digital drives 3-4yrs old.

P.S. All recovered just fine and now the drive tests as okay.

Can this drive be trusted?

Was it just a freak occurance?

[jroc]

Windows can crash and do weird things...if the drive showed offline...you could have went to 'Adminstrative Tools' Disk Management and put it back online....

[Kelsenellenelvian]

Welll s*** someone should have told me that sooner.

[horsecharles]

I'd look up WD's warranty period-- 4/5 years is about the upper limit for most-- they have a nice online diagnostic: anything shows up off, they'll rma it for you(do register it first though, as well as image everything off it)

[Marsden]

Where are your backups?

[Kelsenellenelvian]

That was my back-up the most recent hard back-up I had was 2 months old a lot of work was done in that time. It is all okay though I got it recovered.