I lost a complete hard drive from Windows. Not dead, just completely dropped out "My Computer" all together, but is now asking to be initalized, and new partition. How can this happen on its own? I did nothing but enter Hibernate last night only to wake up to it slowly reporting errors saying Windos cannot save DATA for "such and such" items (from said drive). The were disappearing 1 by 1 as fast as I can read them. I unplugged the SATA cable, but when I plugged it back in, it is no longer available to acces anymore. Even rstarting and System Restore did nothing.
This is a pretty recent drive install and format (Feb '08) for media app temps and some games. I lost parts of one the same month on this same system, a Firewire external w/ 2 partitions, the 2nd larger one was baddly corrupted, loosing lots of files and folders due to Windows eoors and checkdisc removing files and folders from system. I was never told how to get them back either.
I can only guess the DATA is really still there, but my questions as to how to recover it was never really answered the last time I lost DATA. Nothing If I format, I can also guess I am writing over old data as I go making it harder to recover, but how long do I have to wait to get responce on how to read old that Windows says I cant see anymore, What apps see this un alocated files and folders? I am not interested in services I have to send drive out to, I will pay for aoftware that allows me to do it at my home/office
You can use the free "testdisk" program, testdisk will try to repair the partitions. On the download of testdisk it also comes with a addon called "photorec" that's the actual recovery software.
The program can be run from within windows, the exe files are located in the "win" folder and you just doubleclick on the exe file (installation is not required). The program is also available in a "linux livecd" and can be run from that cd, and it is also available as a plugin for the bartpe.
It does show up in disc mnt. as I thought I said. Just not sean as partitioned anymmore. It called to be initialized again. Since the app I ran didnt show anything I could use. I chose to partition just 10gb of it and now it shows up so I'm gonna see if I can recover anything with GetDataBack now. I left the rest unpartitioned. What can I use to brouse this un partitioned, but just previously written to disc?
Also I'm on my own with warrenty, I baught this disc new 4yrs ago an dbarely opend it to use for backing up parts of the bigger HDD that corrupted, wich is almost 2 yrs old. It's a Seagate Barricuda, not sure on the warrenty length. I know even my old Raptors had 3yrs and are all up/expired by now too.
