Hard Drive Disappearing from Explorer "Dirty Bit"

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SeismicAltop

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Mar 21, 2013
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I have been having some problems with my old hard drive lately. It is an IDE drive. I have three hard drives in my system. A 75 GB boot drive which is working fine. A 450 GB drive which just disappeared, and another 450 GB that is working fine. I have been having problems with the D drive, the one that's broken, for a couple days now. I started windows 7 ultimate one day and startup got stuck on the starting windows screen. Then it went to a screen that said it needed to check my D drive for consistency. I let it check my D drive for about a half hour and then when it was finished it locked up and I had to do a hard shutoff. Then I turned on the computer again and it went to the same thing, but this time I cancelled it by pressing escape a couple times. I looked into this a little and I figured that my hard drive had a dirty bit. I did a little more research and figured out that I needed to run a script in CMD called "CHKDSK /f /r D:" I did this and let it run for two days straight. After two days it said it was on a certain file I cant remember the number it was, but It was stuck on that number for three days and I assumed it had failed. I closed CMD and tried to open the D drive in windows explorer. It loaded for a couple minutes then the computer locked up when it was near finished and I had to do a hard shut off. I turned my computer back on and it said what it did before, checking for consistency on D. I cancelled it and windows booted. Then I opened up explorer and D was gone. It's a 5 year old computer so I guess the hard drives have lasted pretty long, but I want to get the most out of it. Any ideas?
 
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InvalidError
If you have data on it precious enough to bother with professional data recovery then you probably shouldn't try doing anything with it and just ship it there.

If you just want to see how much of it you might be able to salvage on your own, remove the problematic HDD from your PC, make sure you have enough room to backup whatever you want to salvage on your remaining drives, put the problematic HDD in an external USB HDD enclosure and cross your fingers that you'll manage to get some data back before the HDD interface freezes. When it does, you can turn off the USB enclosure for 10-20 minutes to let the HDD cool and rinse-and-repeat until either your backup is done or the drive is completely hosed.
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InvalidError

InvalidError

Titan
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May 18, 2007
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When you notice a HDD starting to do weird stuff like mysteriously disappearing or causing the OS to freeze on IO, it usually is a good idea to start doing backups immediately.

Once you get to the point the drive won't show up in Windows, any remaining data you haven't already backed up is likely toast unless you can afford sending it out for data recovery.
 
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SeismicAltop

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Mar 21, 2013
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I would have done that but this problem happened overnight.
 
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InvalidError

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
May 18, 2007
23,815
5,265
108,890
If you have data on it precious enough to bother with professional data recovery then you probably shouldn't try doing anything with it and just ship it there.

If you just want to see how much of it you might be able to salvage on your own, remove the problematic HDD from your PC, make sure you have enough room to backup whatever you want to salvage on your remaining drives, put the problematic HDD in an external USB HDD enclosure and cross your fingers that you'll manage to get some data back before the HDD interface freezes. When it does, you can turn off the USB enclosure for 10-20 minutes to let the HDD cool and rinse-and-repeat until either your backup is done or the drive is completely hosed.
 
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