Bricked HDD

[bonzai_cyberninja]

So, apparently accidentally telling your second hdd to dismount instead of your external hdd is not such a cool idea, especially when it has all your games installed on it. Fortunately it does not have anything to do with my windows installation on it, however i don't really wanna have to reinstall the 200 odd gigs worth of games on there.

So I'm wondering, how do i get the drive to stop showing up as an empty drive, and get it to realise its actually full of data that i want to use.

I'm pretty sure I did this once before, years ago, but I cant remember how to do it!

 

[Melvis]

So windows cant see the drive at all?

You might have to go to disk management to tell windows that there is a drive?

What OS are you running?

 

[qubit]

It sounds like you've corrupted the file system. You'll have to use a data recovery utility. Or better still, reformat it and restore your data from the daily backup you make.

 

[bonzai_cyberninja]

So windows cant see the drive at all?

You might have to go to disk management to tell windows that there is a drive?

What OS are you running?

Windows 7 x64 ultimate, as mentionded in my specs

It shows up in the windows disk management as an unallocated disk, thinking that its full of lovely free space, and not full of all my games.
So its not recognising as a usable disk

It sounds like you've corrupted the file system. You'll have to use a data recovery utility. Or better still, reformat it and restore your data from the daily backup you make.

yea, it may be, although that seems kindda odd, as all it did was get a dismount command, why would that corrupt all its data.

any ideas as to how i can make it behave??? i dont need to recover any data, i have all the install disk's etc, thats not a problem, but i would like to avoid the pain of reinstall
What can i do?

oh yeah, forgot to add, i dont backup my games drive, i dont have limitless hdd space

 

[qubit]

Yeah, you do have limitless disc space: 2TB drives are super cheap nowadays.

I back up my data to two separate hard drives now, one on a separate PC and I'm gonna add a third. Paranoid? You betcha. I've also lost important data before not following my own good advice and the pain is just not worth it. The data can be priceless and irreplaceable, depending on what it is eg family photos, account details of those critical offshore accounts used to hide from the taxman...

I can't remember any recovery utilities off the top of my head. However, if you search the storage forum you'll see suggestions for good ones. People were posting about something like this just a couple of weeks back, so it shouldn't be too hard to find.

 

[bonzai_cyberninja]

Yeah, you do have limitless disc space: 2TB drives are super cheap nowadays.

I back up my data to two separate hard drives now, one on a separate PC and I'm gonna add a third. Paranoid? You betcha. I've also lost important data before not following my own good advice and the pain is just not worth it. The data can be priceless and irreplaceable, depending on what it is eg family photos, account details of those critical offshore accounts used to hide from the taxman...

I can't remember any recovery utilities off the top of my head. However, if you search the storage forum you'll see suggestions for good ones. People were posting about something like this just a couple of weeks back, so it shouldn't be too hard to find.

Cheers mate, ill have a look and see what i can find. As for the backups, well, when your in the financial poop like i am atm, even a nice cheap 2TB drive becomes a rather expensive luxury, so i have to make do with a backup of just the OS drive, and again, as its only games, its not priceless data, just a pain in the ass to have to reinstall.

 

[qubit]

Cheers mate, ill have a look and see what i can find. As for the backups, well, when your in the financial poop like i am atm, even a nice cheap 2TB drive becomes a rather expensive luxury, so i have to make do with a backup of just the OS drive, and again, as its only games, its not priceless data, just a pain in the ass to have to reinstall.

Ah, lack of money, I know it well. One can pick up a 500GB or 1T HD for very little money though, so I do recommend stretching to at least one of those, if you can.

I'm glad you didn't have anything priceless on there, it's a really horrible experience to lose it.

One last tip: we all tend to store stuff on our desktop - mine's plastered with icons. Watch out that some of those don't fall into that "priceless" category. It could be something as simple as a link to a handy website, or a quick note you made. Game saves in your user profile are another hidden source of priceless data. Be sure to back those up and they won't take much space, either. Heck, you can use a cheap as chips USB stick for this task if you want to.

Finally, Karen's Replicator is an excellent backup tool, which I use myself and best of all, it's totally free.

www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp

 

[Melvis]

Windows 7 x64 ultimate, as mentionded in my specs

It shows up in the windows disk management as an unallocated disk, thinking that its full of lovely free space, and not full of all my games.
So its not recognising as a usable disk



yea, it may be, although that seems kindda odd, as all it did was get a dismount command, why would that corrupt all its data.

any ideas as to how i can make it behave??? i dont need to recover any data, i have all the install disk's etc, thats not a problem, but i would like to avoid the pain of reinstall
What can i do?

oh yeah, forgot to add, i dont backup my games drive, i dont have limitless hdd space

Ahh righto, wanted to make sure if its that computer or another one you may own

When i formatted my computer just a few weeks back, the OS wouldn't see my 1TB HDD even though it did before. I was worried that id lose all my data thinking id have to format the drive again. But when i went into disk management there is another option there and that worked great, and now Windows 7 64 can see the drive again as normal.

For a recovery program i did use one just the other yr, but i cant remember the name of it now, once my m8 gets back ill ask him and let ya know, it worked VERY well.