Harddrive not showing files

Zaroaster

March 21, 2011 4:11:59 PM

I have a Western digital 7500 external drive, which up until yesterday was working fine. I leave to go to the store and when I come back the drive is no longer showing any files, even though about 500Gb was stored. I've even tried scanning the disc with several undelete programs thinking the system, or someone, may have accidentally deleted the files, but nothing shows up. It's almost as if the drive was never used, as the drive shows up in my-computer as 100% empty and there's seemingly no history of anything ever being on it.

Any idea what happened?

More about : harddrive showing files

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CompTIA_Rep

March 21, 2011 7:06:14 PM

Have you checked the event log?
right click on "computer" and select manage. Select Event Viewer and expand Windows Logs. Select System and read through the errors.

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Zaroaster

March 22, 2011 2:19:05 PM

CompTIA_Rep said:

Have you checked the event log?
right click on "computer" and select manage. Select Event Viewer and expand Windows Logs. Select System and read through the errors.

Checking that now and I see some things tagged disk and volmgr, but i'm not quite sure what they mean, and I see nothing explicitly about data loss.

I took a screenshot, http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/6504/winf.jpg

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CompTIA_Rep

March 22, 2011 2:47:30 PM

The screenshot was perfect. Thanks.
So this means you may have a hardware issue. I'd start by

moving the drive to another SATA port on the motherboard.
then, replace the sata cable.
if those don't work, the drive may be having issues.

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Zaroaster

March 23, 2011 12:46:37 AM

CompTIA_Rep said:

The screenshot was perfect. Thanks.
So this means you may have a hardware issue. I'd start by

moving the drive to another SATA port on the motherboard.
then, replace the sata cable.
if those don't work, the drive may be having issues.

but it's an external drive...

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CompTIA_Rep

March 23, 2011 12:45:34 PM

Ah, thats fine. The event log is pointing to drive 1 ( really drive 2) external or not. In that case, it may be an issue with the enclosure itself. Try the drive on another computer (easy thing to do) and see if things improve, otherwise, you may be looking at a bad enclosure, which happens pretty often.

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Zaroaster

March 23, 2011 8:04:09 PM

CompTIA_Rep said:

Ah, thats fine. The event log is pointing to drive 1 ( really drive 2) external or not. In that case, it may be an issue with the enclosure itself. Try the drive on another computer (easy thing to do) and see if things improve, otherwise, you may be looking at a bad enclosure, which happens pretty often.

I have to take a trip for a day or so, so i'll report back once i've tried it then.

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