Lost hard drive partition in Vista

[pc_mike38]

Hi all,

I had formatted my hdd with two NTFS partitions, C and D. It's a 250GB Western Digital SATA II desktop drive. I've had it about 2 years probably. For some reason it is now showing drive D (184GB) as Free Space, when there should be data on it and the drive letter doesn't appear in My Computer, it only shows drive C!
This is a self-built desktop based on an Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 with a Gigabyte motherboard, EG41MF-US2H and 3GB Crucial Ram. I built this about two months ago, and used the hdd from my previous system as it's compatible.

Is this a Vista issue I wonder?

Any help gratefully appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[whogie]

I've seen this a couple of times.

Go into Computer Management in Admin Tools. Find your disk in the Disk Management tab, right click it, and assign it a letter.

 

[pc_mike38]

THanks for the reply Whogie,

I've looked there, the drive partition that was drive D before it disappeared is now showing as free space and when I assigned the partition a drive letter it said "This drive is not formatted. Please format this drive in order to use it"! That would mean loosing my data.

Anyway, I downloaded the Western Digital hard drive Diagnostics from the Western Digital website last night, ran a test and it failed straight away! So it looks my hdd is on the way out! I'm not impressed to say the least as I've only had it about 2 years. I've still got an old 40GB IBM IDE hdd from around 10 years ago that still works fine. Time to buy a new HDD me thinks before the old one dies completely.

Thanks again.

Regards,

Mike

 

[evongugg]

Get some data recovery software. Try to rescue what you need.