Be Excellent To Each Other

Missing was too long for the subtitle.

So, basically, one of my hard drives has disappeared. It was definitely working fine earlier today, but I put in a usb drive and it was assigned the letter E, which had me wondering where my E drive has gone.

Disk Management helpfully tells me it's "missing", but I do appear to have an identically sized drive if I'd like to initialise that?

Basically, it's a SATA drive, shows up in the bios, windows can detect it, but obviously doesn't recognize it as the drive it was a few hours ago, and I've tried an Ubuntu live cd, but that didn't want to mount the drive.

Ideally, I'd like to not lose everything on there, if that's an option.

Any suggestions?

If nobody comes up with anything obvious, don't forget about Restore.

I've obviously forgotten about it, do you mean system restore?

maybe it's the cable?

try it on another pc?

Malc

I don't have any other SATA capable pcs to hand, but I can always mess swap it with my other drive in this pc which is running fine.
The fact that everything would seem to suggest the cable is fine, but stranger things have happened.

If the BIOS can see it, it might be worth giving it a once over with SpinRite.

From your local software retailer.

Sounds like a job for GetDataBack

Thanks guys, my local software retailer had copies of both, so I've gone with GetDataBack which is currently churning away.
It's managed to throw some filenames at me, so hopefully all is not lost.

Unfortunately, it's a 500GB disk, so I have no idea where I'm going to backup what it recovers, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

One of my hard drives recently blew up. Unfortunately it is:
a) The one with both working operating systems on it
b) the one with the MBR + Grub

oh yeah and

c) XP won't recognise the drives unless I feed it a floppy disk - which is something I left behind when moving recently.

Anyway, it can boot into windows (quite slowly) but then just kinda dies. I've had something like this before with this drive (I think it's this drive, rather than the other...), but that was caused by a loose connection. Not this time, however So what can these magic programs do? Can they recover all my porn and stuffs for me? Are they good? Tell me more before I spend money!

If it had been anything to do with re-attaching or hanging counterbalance weights or sash jute cord, I might have been able to help

Not sure if I missed the option in GetDataBack, but SpinRite (I thought I'd better purchase both while I was at my local software retailer) has the option to create a bootable cd, would that be any help?

MrD, you would appear to be a star.
After a 2 hour recovery process, I'm now trying to find enough space on my various other hard drives to recover everything.

Thanks everyone for your help.

Think I used Acronis True Image.

Can you use the backup as a normal drive? Or at least extract files from it individually?

As in the image that True Image creates? I don't think so, but I can't remember, it's been a while.

Norton Ghost. Or Carbon Copier for Macs.

Ghost is very good. Even comes with a free potters wheel.

Huzzah!



Though "Don't thank me - thank the knife!"

There's another (free, but slightly less thorough and stable) program called PC File Inspector Recovery that's really useful too. PCFIR can analyse disks that don't have a letter, I wasn't sure if GDB could do that too, but it seems it can.

Ok, so I seem to have rescued everything onto a variety of other disks, and am in the process of reintroducing my drive to windows.
I'll give it a run through with CheckDisk, but is there anything else I should do before I risk putting stuff back on or should I write the drive off altogether?

Bin it pronto, unless you're feeling very lucky.

If the drive has ever made a strange noise, definitely bin it.

Never heard a peep out of it, but I'll be very wary of it before filling it back up without any backups.

If you use your copy of SpinRite when you boot from the CD it'll check the physical disk thoroughly and save you any heartache later. It's worth the time spent.

Thanks, Sheepeh, I will probably give that a go. I have done a full format and checkdisk on it and it hasn't grumbled.

If I'm going to be honest, I bought an Acer Aspire One over the weekend, and I spent most of yesterday messing around trying to make bootable USB sticks so I could install windows on it and I think that may have somehow had something to do with it.

I'll give it a run with SpinRite though because, as you say, if there's anything physically wrong with the disk, it's better I ditch it now, rather than risk losing everything later.