Personal computing discussed

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55brianb
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Location: London

Sun Mar 17, 2002 7:03 am

I'm panicing now! I've lost part of a hard disk overnight.

Woke up this morning to a blank screen (pc is always left on at the weekend - running XP Pro). Rebooted the system and everything seemed normal until I tried to access a program, when the system said that the shortcut was invalid, or words to that effect.

I have 2 physical hard disks, the second of which is partitioned into
d and e drives. Drive c is 20gb and is ok. Drive d is 50 gb and is apparently empty, but e, which is on the same physical drive as d, is ok.

If I try to look at d from explorer (the disk label has changed from
'drive 2' to 'local disk') I get the message 'The disk in drive d: is
not formatted. Do you want to format it now? Yes/No'.

I deliberately kept all of my backups on d: as it doesn't get used as much as c: and being on a physically separate drive I thought this made sense. I'm now panicing as it also has work stuff on it too!

Has anyone any ideas how I can get it back???


Thanks
Brian (who's desperate!)
 
Speed
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Location: Chicago, IL USA
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Sun Mar 17, 2002 7:25 am

Unplug the drive with the affected partition. Let that drive be still and cool off for a while. Then run chkdsk on the C: drive. Don't try to fix anything yet! Just take stock of the situation.

If the system doesn't seem stable with just C:, then shut it off, and let both drives cool. If C: looks OK, then concentrate on saving files from there. Make backups right away. Once that's done, then run chkdsk again, and attempt to fix any errors. If there are, rerun chkdsk until it comes up clean. If the system crashes during this procedure, then reinstall Windows.

After you're certain that you have a stable system with the one drive, and the second drive has had at least an hour to cool off, plug #2 back in like it was before, and see what happens. If you see no partitions or logical drives, shut down and put the drive aside. You can decide later if you want to try data recovery. If both logical drives work, first back up data on the one that wasn't working before. Then back up the other one. If you only see one (other than C:), back it up, then set the drive aside.

Once your backups are complete, and if you still don't have a D: drive, try running chkdsk. If it doesn't run, look in the disk manager, and see if it shows anything useful. If it says you have a blank disk, then you need to decide if the data was important enough to try to recover. Let me know what you find.

_________________
Stick a fork() in it!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Speed on 2002-03-17 06:46 ]</font>
 
Oldfart
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Joined: Sun Mar 24, 2002 7:00 pm

Mon Mar 25, 2002 4:38 pm

If you are overclocking, you may want to put things back to 'normal'.

Oldfart :grin:
 
Freon
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Joined: Wed Dec 26, 2001 7:00 pm
Location: Indiana

Mon Mar 25, 2002 4:52 pm

My /Program Files directory mysteriously disintegrated itself in WinXP Pro. About 3/4 of the directories inside my /Program Files directory just VANISHED one day.

I scanned my disk for viruses but found nothing.

Needless to say, I'm running 2k again. I can't say I can absolutely confirm it was XP's fault, but better safe...
 
0oALio0

Wed Mar 27, 2002 7:25 pm

I haven't seen anything like that in all my xp experience. Are you sure the OS just deleted this folder? I'm guessing human error was to blame.
 
Speed
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Location: Chicago, IL USA
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Wed Mar 27, 2002 9:41 pm

Confucius say he who scan for virus but never scan for filesystem corruption barking up wrong tree.
You are false data.
 
55brianb
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Location: London

Thu Mar 28, 2002 5:57 am

I think it was a problem to do with the partitions on the affected disk: apparently any FAT32 partition of over 32 gb cannot be *created* under XP, but XP will happily *use* one if it was created on another system (eg Win 98) and this will later cause problems. When the amount of data stored on the disk reaches the partition maximum, data loss will occur (I found this on the Western Digital website).

It seems to have been what happened in my case, as the affected partition was 55gb (FAT32) and 50gb of that was full. The other partition on the same disk (5gb FAT32 of which about a 1/2gb was used) was unaffected.

Luckily I managed to get pretty much all of the data off the disk with data recovery software.
 
0oALio0

Thu Mar 28, 2002 11:34 pm

Is that only with Western Digital hard drives?
 
55brianb
Gerbil In Training
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Joined: Sat Mar 16, 2002 7:00 pm
Location: London

Fri Mar 29, 2002 4:13 am

No, I found the information on the Western Digital website, but the drive I had the problems with was a Quantum Fireball.

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