Tom's Hardware > Forum > Windows XP > Windows XP General Discussion > Windows No Longer See Partition On Second Drive

Windows No Longer See Partition On Second Drive

Forum Windows XP : Windows XP General Discussion - Windows No Longer See Partition On Second Drive

Tom's Hardware: Over 1.4 million members in 6 different countries available to answer all your high-tech questions. Sign up now! Its free!
Ask the community Add a reply
Word :    Username :           
 
newseed   11-11-2009 at 03:11:50 AM

Not sure if this belongs in this forum or not.

Overview:

I have two hard drives. Both are Western Digital.

The first one had drive had partition C and H. Naturally the C drive is the boot drive.

The second Drive has partition E, F and G. This drive is less than one year old.

I was attempting to open a file from partition F from the second drive and then all the sudden it frozed on me. I could not even do CTRL-ALT-DEL to get to the task bar.

After waitng a few minutes, I finally decide to shut it down via turning the power off.

I rebooted and all was fine until I notice that my second drive was not showing up at all via Windows Explorer. None of the partition showed up.

So I then shut down and rebooted. Went into my bios setup noticed that I could see that the second drive is being read.

So I exit the bios and rebooted.

After reboot, I was able to see the second drive which has partition E, F and G.

Now I am able to see the files for partition E and G in which I am able to see all the files there. Howefver, partition F does not show any files. In fact, when I click on partition F, it said that this partition is not formatted and ask if I wanted to format it. Naturaully, I clicked no.

I ran my Casper 5.0 program to see the partition and according to the results, it indicates that the F partition has 100% free space.

I'm afraid that I lost everything on that partition but I am posting here to see if there are other methods to check the partition or why it's not working or a possible solution.

The F partition has all my work on it and I really like to see if I can get it back. I do have a backup but that was 4 months ago.

Thanks for any help you may provide.

Add a reply
Sponsored Links
Register or log in to remove.
sturm   11-11-2009 at 01:43:01 PM

Download a free hard drive file recovery utility and see if you can get the files off. Some of these utilities can also recover a partition, but I would try that AFTER getting the data off.
Sounds like something went wrong in either the FAT table or possibly the MBR.

------------------------------ I ain't signing nothin
 Reply to sturm
newseed   11-11-2009 at 02:58:34 PM

I shut down last night and rebooted this morning. This time the second hard drive can only see the files on partition E whereas partition F and G does not show the files.

I have not tried a file recovery utility.


Message edited by newseed on 11-11-2009 at 03:00:02 PM
Reply to newseed
dunklegend   11-11-2009 at 07:41:08 PM

Download a live CD like Ubuntu and see if linux sees those partitions.

I've had luck using this method, if the cause of the problem is windows related you will be able to at least do a backup of your files.

------------------------------ For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
 Reply to dunklegend
newseed   11-18-2009 at 03:27:31 AM

I was able to use a file recovery tool and got about 99% of the files recovered.

The SMART function became inoperable.

Thanks for you input.


Message edited by newseed on 11-18-2009 at 03:29:09 AM
Reply to newseed
Ask the community Add a reply
Tom's Hardware > Forum > Windows XP > Windows XP General Discussion > Windows No Longer See Partition On Second Drive
Go to:

There are 1289 identified and unidentified users. To see the list of identified users, Click here.

Forum map
Bestofmedia Forum ©
2000-2009 Bestofmedia Group
Page generated in 0.445 seconds
Sponsored links
  • Ask the community now
  • Publish
Ad
Related Topics
See all relatives topics
They won a badge
Join us in greeting them
How do I win badges?