3Tb HDD vanished from windows

Solfaur

So I own this WD 3Tb HDD that use for storage for several months now. All went fine, no issues up until today when something very strange happend.

When I was making an archive of about 100Gbs on the disk th box started showing up a lot of errors, so I stopped the process and noticed a lot of my files started showing up as "file not found".

So I did a system restart and to my surprise my disk stopped showing up alltogether, just like that. I went to disk managment where it's shown as "Disk 2 746.39 GB Unallocated" like it was when I first installed the drive months ago...

The disk seems healty enough, it shows up when booting or in HD Tune Pro but just when as Local Disk E as it was up until this happend.

I didn't do any format or recovery methods yet because I have no clue how to approach this issue. Any ideeas?

Luvabud · 07-05-2012, 15:53 | posts: 919 | Location: Uk

You could give testdisk a try, I've used it in the past to restore partitions that have just vanished, scan the hard drive and write a new MBR. But if you're having write errors like that, I wouldn't trust that hard drive.

IcE · 07-05-2012, 16:20 | posts: 7,097 | Location: Toledo, Ohio

Write errors/files disappearing is basically a clear as day sign the hard drive is about to fail.

Luvabud · 07-05-2012, 16:50 | posts: 919 | Location: Uk

Quote:

Originally Posted by IcE

Write errors/files disappearing is basically a clear as day sign the hard drive is about to fail.

I think it could be a bad power connection. I think sata plugs are the worst idea ever to be thought of.

I've got an ancient hard drive that just stops working and clicks, clean the contacts on the pcb and it works again like new, a lot of it could be due to bad power unless smart says otherwise.

Solfaur · 07-05-2012, 16:52 | posts: 3,036 | Location: Romania

I did a research and it looks like my Gigabyte X58-UD7 motherboard did not support 3Tb HDD, so when I reached 2.2Tb while making that archive it apparently crashed.

So I proceded to update my bios to the latest (and pretty much last) official F8 bios wich supposedly adds support for 3TB HDDs. I also moved the sata connector to a SATA III Marvell one and now the Disk Management window looks like this:

I did NOT do any kind of format or messing arround with the drive but it still looks like it won't recocgnize my data? Is there a way arround this ?

Solfaur · 07-05-2012, 17:05 | posts: 3,036 | Location: Romania

And btw, SMART HDD Health looks perfectly fine in HDtune for example, everything looks healty, no errors, or anything like that.

My question is if I can recover the data somehow even though it should have shown up after I did all the bios updates and changes.

Fender178 · *Last edited by Fender178; 07-05-2012 at 18:57.*

Hmm thats weird.
Have you tried running a check disk to that hard drive? I would try moving the hard drive back to the original SATA port that you been using and see if that works.

Solfaur · 07-05-2012, 19:07 | posts: 3,036 | Location: Romania

In this state it does not allow me to, it says "Cannot open volume for direct access"...

Atm I'm running a recovery tool for the next hours, and see if I can save some of the stuff. Will try what you suggested tomorrow. If I knew 3Tb HDD would be such a pain I would have passed, or at least upgrade my system, speaking of wich I will probably go z77 in the near future.

Fender178 · 07-05-2012, 19:26 | posts: 461 | Location: Pennsylvania

Ok. Lets hope the recovery tool works. Then if it does I would make a back up of it asap.

rflair · 07-06-2012, 00:41 | posts: 2,221 | Location: Canada

Hirens BootCD.

It lets you run a live version of XP that should see the drive, I hope.