How does a Hard Drive unformat itself? Cause' it happened.

[Name_Already_Taken]

So I just got some new hardrives in and was ready to go to town and throw em' in the ol' VP6 system I got brewin'. I will say that this system runs fine and I have the SCSI system just fine, runs great and never had a problem and blah blah blah. But After installing a SeaGate 500GB drive on the SCSI (which is Ultra ATA 100), and then going into disk manager and formatting and all that great stuff, the other drive I had on the SCSI bus, on a seperate channel, disappeared from that great product Windows. Yes the BIOS for the SCSI system does detect and I even tried it on the main system bus off of SCSI, and the system BIOS did detect. Now get this, I go to disk manager and it showed up as a dynamic disk and after setting back to basic it was showing unformatted, it was even formatted ten minutes before new hard drive install. Gee that's strange because it was formatted and running fine for a year. I guess windows was ready to just get rid of the Formatt Info. Anyway can a hardrive just unformat itself? Can the data be recovered. Never heard of this. And apparently it is unique because I can't find any other info on this problem. All of my hard drives are Ultra ATA 100 and I use the master/slave setup instead of cable select, and I also tried the misfit hard drive on cable select and same thing, no formatt. 500GB runs great though! I may buy some more, unless Windows decides it does not want them. :?

 

[croc]

I'm not the most knowledgable Raid person here, but I've never heard of a SCSI ata 100 interface...

 

[Name_Already_Taken]

Yeah I know, I am running some ancient stuff. I have an ABIT VP6 board. It has a raid controller on it called the "HighPoint 370". The BIOS controls IDE 1 and 2 at Ultra ATA 100, and the HighPoint controller will run four additional devices on two more IDE controllers (3 and 4) at Ultra ATA 100. I guess you would call it an Addtional IDE controller but you can configure it for RAID 0, 1, and 0+1. I am going to turn it into a file server. The book for the board calls it SCSI. This board is CIRCA 2001. There is quite a following for the VP6 so I was hoping maybe someone has run into this problem before. Or for that matter any problem like this. I have extensive knowledge of building computers and running software and always run into problems that I can figure out and fix, but I have never dealt with anything like this before.

 

[plankmeister]

SeaGate 500GB drive on the SCSI (which is Ultra ATA 100)

8O :?:

 

[Name_Already_Taken]

Ok the confusion is setting in. Yes this is a SeaGate 500GB drive which is Ultra ATA 100 not SATA, i do know the diffrence between the two. The drive is not a SCSI drive is a regular ol' Ultra ATA 100 IDE interface. It is on an IDE interface. We won't even call it SCSI anymore. It is on IDE 4. I have 4 IDE channels and this hardrive is on the last channel 4. Wait this isn't even the drive that's the problem. The basic problem is this:
I turn on my computer and for some strange reason windows says that one of my 80GB Western Digital Hardrives is no longer formatted. It was fine yesterday and for the year I have had it but today it is all of a sudden no longer formatted. Any ideas?

 

[kasperlindvig]

Install a data recovery program and save all the data from the 80GB to one of the 500GB disks. Then repartition the 80GB disk and you should be ready to go.

 

[rcs2749]

now get this, I go to disk manager and it showed up as a dynamic disk and after setting back to basic it was showing unformatted,

I think this is normal. You can go basic to dynamic with no problems but if you go from dynamic to basic you lose all your data (have to reformat).