Hard Drive No Longer Visible after Memory Dump

drdru7029

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Sep 19, 2010
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I'm wondering if someone might be able to help me figure out what happened last night with my hard drive.

I have two hard drives in my computer. One is a 750gb Samsung, which is partitioned and which holds my operating system (Win7) and Users files. The other is a Samsung 2tb which I bought about a month ago, and which stores backups, media files etc.

I was using my computer as normal and, as I happened to be looking at my torrent download application (which stores data to the 2tb drive), I noticed an error appeared on one of the files indicating an invalid target directory. Before I know it, a blue screen appears and begins to perform a memory dump, and the computer restarts.
Upon restart I can no longer find the 2tb hd in My Computer. Worried, I restart, enter the BIOS, and run a short SMART scan, which turns out fine. After I reload this time the hard drive shows up and I can access files. Tired, I turn the computer off for the night. In the morning the same problem occurs again. I didn't have time to perform the same test as before, and now I'm at work thinking about what to do when I arrive home. Can anyone help me shed some light on what these symptoms indicate? Are there simply some bad sectors, or might this be something more serious?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you!
 

HeavensDisciple

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Oct 29, 2011
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Hi drdru7029

I experienced the same problem as you, the only problem being that mine was an external, I was in the middle of a file transfer and all of a sudden i see the blue screen of death... At this point after restarting the computer no longer recognized my external drive.

I am running win7 and what i did to fix the problem was:

1) Access your 'device manager' by right clicking on 'my computer' and selecting 'properties'
2) In my case I had to plug in the drive and it popped up under 'Universal Serial Bus Controllers' as a mass storage device'
3) I uninstalled this mass storage device by right clicking and pressing 'uninstall'
4) Unplug mass storage device and reinsert it
5) Installation takes place and walla, it recognized the drive again without any loss of data.

I am assuming that with an internal hard drive you would have to access a seperate section in the device manager, either way, find a way to uninstall it using my method, then plug it in again after a computer restart and after the reinstallation your computer should recognize it again.

Hope it helped
CG