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It all began when i got a bluescreen from nowhere, i ignored it and started my computer again and tried to access my hard drive, but explorer stopped responding and the drive is no longer visible. I shutdown my computer, took out the drive, waited for an hour and started my computer with the drive again, it worked for the rest of the night.

The next day when i started my computer the hard drive was not visible. I went into the disk manager and saw that the hard drive was offline and all space on it was unallocated.

I tried to recover the partitions with MiniTool Partition Wizard. It got to around 60% and stopped responding. I downloaded the bootable version and it showed my lost partition with all files in it and it also showed a partition which was 128 MB in size.

I have tried to access the drive with another computer, but it shows the same result, offline and all space is unallocated.

I don't know what to do now, why can't windows see my partition?

Sorry for the long post.

Erikvader
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1 Answers1

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It sounds like your hard drive is dying. Depending on how risk you are you should

(a) Verify it is dying. You can do this by looking at the S.M.A.R.T values in the drive. (How to do this varies by OS, but there are plenty tools which will let you do it). If your data is particularly valuable, skip this step, assume its faulty and go to step (b) as any reads you make on the disk could make the problem worse.

(b) Acquire another drive which is at least as large as the current drive. (it can be larger). If you can afford it, get 2 drives.

(c) Try and pull as much raw data off the dying drive as you can. To do this you need a tool which can bit copy and handle failures. I recommend getting a boot disk with (Gnu) DDRescue and using that. You may need to run it multiple times - I'd suggest run it "forward", then when it gets stuck, can it and run it "backwards" - give it as much time as you have on the second pass. Budget at minimum a day, but if you have the time up to a week to get as much off as you can.

(d) Clone the cloned drive to the third drive, and try rescue operations on this. Again, different possibilities, but testdisk may allow you to rebuild your partition information on the new drive.

(e) If (d) does not fail, nuke and repartition the third drive and use Photorec (part of the testdisk suite of tools) to try and pull any data it can identify off the raw disk. There are windows tools to do something similar - for example recuva.

davidgo
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