Halfway through watching listening to some tunes and VLC stopped. All of my music is on my D drive (Disk 1 below) which is now not showing as drive anywhere excepting in disk management. Tried a reboot, no go, drive is not shown in Computer. Tried a disk check but after an hour it was stopped at about 10k or so and didn't move any further. I unplugged and replugged it to see if it was something basic like loose cables, nup. Now When i first boot and go to Disk management it asks me to initialize, which i haven't done as i cannot lose any data on there. Most of my D drive is my kids pics and videos, about 500gb worth, the music and other stuff is easy enough to get back.





HDD is a Western Digital Green 1tb..what now ?

Appears i may save it, using test disk and i have managed to get every photo i have tried so far. Going to have to get a new HDD tomorrow and leave it on overnight to grab it all

Sounds like file system corrupted somehow.

do not re initialize or anything,

use recovery tools to recover files or the entire partition

GetDataBack NTFS
FindAndMount

etc etc


In most cases, I simply Boot uBuntu Live USB Stick,


which allows low level access to files, Copy and Paste from the source drive to a new one, reboot back to windows and verify.

File Systems can be corrupted without a hardware failure.

check event viewer / system for disk and hdd warnings.

Couldn't find anything at all in event viewer, nothing specific to hdd or disk and nothing in hardware. Grabbed a new external and am in the process of recovering and transferring everything now using testdisk. Once that is finished, about halfway atm, i am going to initialize the hdd, chuck some crap on it and see how it goes. I would like to see something pop up that tells me the HDD is fubared, not that i will using it for anything important anyway.

cheers

edit - found it i think. Event- controller error on Device Ide IdePort6. Popped up a few times on the day in question.

Ajay, it might be worth going to WD's support http://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?lang=en
and downloading there Data Lifeguard Diagnostic tool.

Yeah, could be,

Only time I've seen the Drive Lose it's formatting while retaining all data w/o errors in the event viewer, was when power or data cable was abruptly cut when the the MBR sector was being accessed.

Thus corrupting the partition data tables etc.

also happens on it's own randomly if a drive was initialized and formatted the 1st time using "quick format" option in windows.

Running the test now. Managed to get every bit of data off the HDD so very happy about that

Well there you go, test came up as FAIL in big red letters after only 50 seconds in

Not sure if i used the quick format back when i did a reinstall of win7 a few years back

Last post to finish off the subject. Wrote zeros to the disk, ran a quick test and it passed. Ran the longer test overnight and still a pass. Initialized it, dynamic, format (only option i had was quick format) then chose simple volume. Not sure if that's how i really should have went about it but i am just going to use it as a bit of a dump disk and see how she fares