Hard drive not showing up.

shnaek

Spent 3 days on this so far, so I thought I might put a post up here in case anyone has any suggestions.

After being away for a week I came home and switched on my PC. It hung on the windows loading screen. I left it for 2 hours, then I hit the reset button. When the computer started up my E: drive (samsung 1tb internal) was no longer visible.

I checked the bios, and the drive was visible there.

So I downloaded testdisc and analysed the drive. My graphics card began acting odd - restarting every so often. (I've since read online that this can be due to malware - so perhaps there is malware on the E: drive?)

I attempted a deep scan with testdisc. After leaving the computer running for 20 hours I assumed that testdisc had hung, so I restarted the computer. I have since downloaded lots of free file recover software with no success. I'm trying BPlansoft as I type this post.

If anyone has any advice I'd love to hear it. Ready to tear my hair out here!

TheBoffin

Is the disk showing in Disk Management?

shnaek

TheBoffin wrote: »

Is the disk showing in Disk Management?

Yes it is.

uch

Can you see a Drive letter assigned to it ?

shnaek

uch wrote: »

Can you see a Drive letter assigned to it ?

Yes I can.

shnaek

Something I've just discovered - If I unplug the problematic internal hard drive and reboot the machine, then the system reserved E drive partition of the main hard drive appears. However, if I plug back in the sata cable for the problem drive then the e drive partition doesn't show.

shnaek

uch wrote: »

Can you see a Drive letter assigned to it ?

I can no longer see a drive letter assigned to it.

kaimera

Change the drive letter of the recovery partition to something other than 'E'; some sort of conflict with the other drive possibly

Irish Steve

Sorry, SLOW DOWN SOME

How many HDD's does this machine have? also, what operating system are we talking about, if Windows, which version

Is there a C drive, and is it on the same physical device as the E Drive, or are there multiple physical devices in the machine?.

If it is one physical device, then ideally, find a friend or someone you trust who can examine the entire disc as an external device on their machine, to reduce the number of writes that are happening on the suspect device, just in case there is a hardware failure issue happening here.

The other possibility is that it could be malware that has corrupted critical data on the physical drive that is also preventing access to the E drive, there is information that is not in C or E that controls how the machine finds the information for both devices, That's most easily found by connecting the disc to another working computer using an external caddy/connection system,

shnaek

Irish Steve wrote: »

Sorry, SLOW DOWN SOME

How many HDD's does this machine have? also, what operating system are we talking about, if Windows, which version

4 HDDS, Windows 7 Ultimate

Irish Steve wrote: »

Is there a C drive, and is it on the same physical device as the E Drive, or are there multiple physical devices in the machine?.
If it is one physical device, then ideally, find a friend or someone you trust who can examine the entire disc as an external device on their machine, to reduce the number of writes that are happening on the suspect device, just in case there is a hardware failure issue happening here.

Yes, and it isn't on the same physical device as the E drive. It's a 64gig solid state drive on which windows has reserved about 10G

Irish Steve wrote: »

The other possibility is that it could be malware that has corrupted critical data on the physical drive that is also preventing access to the E drive, there is information that is not in C or E that controls how the machine finds the information for both devices, That's most easily found by connecting the disc to another working computer using an external caddy/connection system,

I fear it might be malware alright. I attempted to connect it to another machine I have here, but perhaps that machine is too old - had to be a Sata card so I could connect it.

Irish Steve

OK, I can breath slightly easier on that side of things.

If it's SATA, then there are relatively cheap caddy's available to connect as an external device, which might show some differences. It's just possible that the controller has an issue, or that the power supply to the device may have gone bad, putting it in something like an external USB to SATA caddy should make that elimination, and in theory, it should show up in a USB caddy without too much problem.

The other advantage of doing something external is that you will be able to tell much more readily if the device is spinning up OK, and if it is being seen by the operating system.

If you have a USB caddy, it should be possible to see that device on a machine that's as old as XP, I have a 2 TB SATA external via USB running here on an old XP home based laptop, and it's seeing it fine.

Have you had a look in the system logs to see if there are any hints there about issues, either with software or the device? It could just be that a block in the Master Boot record of that disc has got corrupted, that will be more than enough to upset windows.

It certainly would be worth trying to access the disc on another machine using a USB device, as that would eliminate a whole chunk of issues pretty rapidly. Another machine should at the minimum see the device, and install drivers for it, and then try to mark it on, if that works, then the issue will be with the W7 machine.

Slightly nervous that the E drive moves when you disconnect the suspect device, that suggest that some of the drives are not allocated a fixed ID letter, though it shouldn't have caused this serious a problem.

Hope that helps a bit

Cheers

shnaek

Irish Steve wrote: »

OK, I can breath slightly easier on that side of things.

If it's SATA, then there are relatively cheap caddy's available to connect as an external device, which might show some differences. It's just possible that the controller has an issue, or that the power supply to the device may have gone bad, putting it in something like an external USB to SATA caddy should make that elimination, and in theory, it should show up in a USB caddy without too much problem.

The other advantage of doing something external is that you will be able to tell much more readily if the device is spinning up OK, and if it is being seen by the operating system.

If you have a USB caddy, it should be possible to see that device on a machine that's as old as XP, I have a 2 TB SATA external via USB running here on an old XP home based laptop, and it's seeing it fine.

Have you had a look in the system logs to see if there are any hints there about issues, either with software or the device? It could just be that a block in the Master Boot record of that disc has got corrupted, that will be more than enough to upset windows.

It certainly would be worth trying to access the disc on another machine using a USB device, as that would eliminate a whole chunk of issues pretty rapidly. Another machine should at the minimum see the device, and install drivers for it, and then try to mark it on, if that works, then the issue will be with the W7 machine.

Slightly nervous that the E drive moves when you disconnect the suspect device, that suggest that some of the drives are not allocated a fixed ID letter, though it shouldn't have caused this serious a problem.

Hope that helps a bit

Cheers

Thanks for that, Irish Steve. I'll look into a caddy right now and hopefully that will work out. Even if it doesn't there's no harm in having one. Cheers for all the help - much appreciated.

Irish Steve

Where are you based, might be able to suggest a source depending on location

shnaek

Irish Steve wrote: »

Have you had a look in the system logs to see if there are any hints there about issues, either with software or the device? It could just be that a block in the Master Boot record of that disc has got corrupted, that will be more than enough to upset windows.

"The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\DR0."

shnaek

Irish Steve wrote: »

Where are you based, might be able to suggest a source depending on location

Cork

Irish Steve

Ahh, and that might be the controller for the SSD rather than the drive that's gone walkabout, which could mean an issue with loading the information or drivers for the other drive. An external caddy to look at the drives looks like a good plan, and depending on the hardware, is the controller a PCI card, or built into the motherboard?

Might be worth checking ALL the connections to the motherboard, including power and memory, and giving everything a blast over with an air duster or similar to make sure that there's no dust that's got damp. I've seen issues before where a machine has been off for a few days, and got cold, and the dust gets damp, then it does funny things, blow the dust out, reseat everything, and it's fine for another 6/12 months.

Irish Steve

shnaek wrote: »

Cork

Looks to me like a trip to Maplins will be an answer, and you may be able to get to them before they close, depending on where you are.

shnaek

Irish Steve wrote: »

Looks to me like a trip to Maplins will be an answer, and you may be able to get to them before they close, depending on where you are.

Good call. Cheers

shnaek

Irish Steve wrote: »

Ahh, and that might be the controller for the SSD rather than the drive that's gone walkabout, which could mean an issue with loading the information or drivers for the other drive. An external caddy to look at the drives looks like a good plan, and depending on the hardware, is the controller a PCI card, or built into the motherboard?

Might be worth checking ALL the connections to the motherboard, including power and memory, and giving everything a blast over with an air duster or similar to make sure that there's no dust that's got damp. I've seen issues before where a machine has been off for a few days, and got cold, and the dust gets damp, then it does funny things, blow the dust out, reseat everything, and it's fine for another 6/12 months.

Interesting call. It is quite dusty. I'll give this a go. Thanks

Irish Steve

shnaek wrote: »

Interesting call. It is quite dusty. I'll give this a go. Thanks

Good luck. Will be following the thread, so will see any updates. Maplin should have air duster aerosols as well .

Cheers

shnaek

Irish Steve wrote: »

Good luck. Will be following the thread, so will see any updates. Maplin should have air duster aerosols as well .

Cheers

The update isn't good, I'm afraid
I bought the caddy in Maplins and put it together and attached it to another computer. The drive spun for about 30 seconds, not showing up on the computer, then there was a sort of dull thud and the disc appeard to have stopped spinning.
I tried it 3 times, each with the same result.

I put it back into the original machine and ran seatools on DOS from boot up. The drive passed the short test, but the long test showed up: "Bad sector found" - sector repair failure.

Any further suggestions, or does it seem like I'm out of luck here?
Thanks again.

Irish Steve

It will take some time to run it, and I don't think there's a freeware version, Spinrite (version 6) by Gibson research has a chance of recovering the sector, and will check the rest of the drive as well. The other alternative will be to see if a recovery copy can be made of the disc to get the data off, a lot will depend on where the bad sector is, by the sound of it, the problem is in the MBR or a system area, which is why Windows can't find it

There are programs out there that can do recovery without "booting" the disc, effectively making a mirror copy sector by sector, but off the top of my head right now, I can't remember which one I used last time i had something like this happen. It also needs another drive of similar capacity to write the image to.

Spinrite will do everything possible to recover the sector, if it does recover it, then the best plan will be to get the data copied off the disc as a matter of highest priority, and then find out if the disc is still under warranty with the manufacturer, which it could well be.

SteelyDanJalapeno

shnaek wrote: »

The update isn't good, I'm afraid
I bought the caddy in Maplins and put it together and attached it to another computer. The drive spun for about 30 seconds, not showing up on the computer, then there was a sort of dull thud and the disc appeard to have stopped spinning.
I tried it 3 times, each with the same result.

I put it back into the original machine and ran seatools on DOS from boot up. The drive passed the short test, but the long test showed up: "Bad sector found" - sector repair failure.

Any further suggestions, or does it seem like I'm out of luck here?
Thanks again.

If it's an SSD it shouldn't be spinning.

shnaek

Irish Steve wrote: »

It will take some time to run it, and I don't think there's a freeware version, Spinrite (version 6) by Gibson research has a chance of recovering the sector, and will check the rest of the drive as well. The other alternative will be to see if a recovery copy can be made of the disc to get the data off, a lot will depend on where the bad sector is, by the sound of it, the problem is in the MBR or a system area, which is why Windows can't find it

There are programs out there that can do recovery without "booting" the disc, effectively making a mirror copy sector by sector, but off the top of my head right now, I can't remember which one I used last time i had something like this happen. It also needs another drive of similar capacity to write the image to.

Spinrite will do everything possible to recover the sector, if it does recover it, then the best plan will be to get the data copied off the disc as a matter of highest priority, and then find out if the disc is still under warranty with the manufacturer, which it could well be.

Fantastic. Cheers for that - I'll give spinrite a go. Thanks for all your help.

shnaek

TiltedBrain wrote: »

If it's an SSD it shouldn't be spinning.

It's not an ssd. The OS is on an SSD alright, but this was the original OS drive until I replaced it with the SSD.

SteelyDanJalapeno

shnaek wrote: »

It's not an ssd. The OS is on an SSD alright, but this was the original OS drive until I replaced it with the SSD.

My mistake, I read SSD in a previous post.

Did you try another HDD in the cradle just to make sure the drives are getting enough power and it's not a problem on the system you're using to look at the drive?

shnaek

TiltedBrain wrote: »

My mistake, I read SSD in a previous post.

Did you try another HDD in the cradle just to make sure the drives are getting enough power and it's not a problem on the system you're using to look at the drive?

No worries.
I haven't tried another drive in there. Funnily enough, the drive spins away if it's unconnected to a computer, but after I connect it it shuts down. What a dose!

Irish Steve

The shut down is because it's found something it didn't like, the fact that it runs when unaccessed, (hopefully without strange noises) is a plus, it at least means that there's a chance that the heads haven't crashed into the surface of the disc in a comprehensive manner.

shnaek

Success! Thanks to everyone here who helped. After going through so many different tools and processes, in the end Restorer Ultimate did the job. It rescued practically everything off the hard drive.
Now, it isn't free (cost $30) but the demo version is free, and when you run it you can see what it is able to rescue. $30 very well spent. Happy days!
Thanks again

Irish Steve

thanks for the update, it's nice to know how these scenarios work out, and not everyone gives the final verdict.

Did you find out what the situation is with the original disc, and is it still under warranty?

Cheers

shnaek

Irish Steve wrote: »

thanks for the update, it's nice to know how these scenarios work out, and not everyone gives the final verdict.

Did you find out what the situation is with the original disc, and is it still under warranty?

Cheers

Thanks for your help.
I haven't found that out yet- been busy backing up what I managed to rescue. I had a look on Samsung's website and they say their hard drive warranties last for 3 years. I'll have to look into it though as I am still none the wiser as to what caused the problem in the first place.