Hard drive has become unallocated for no apparent reason (windows 7)

[lowman905]

I have 4 hard drives in my tower amd running windows 7. I came home from work yesterday and one of the 2TB SATA drives was not showing in my computer. I went into disk managment and it said that I must initialize my disk. I have tried to initialize as MBR and GPT with no success. It shows the disk as unallocated. I used the windows start up recovery and when trying to access the disk from the command prompt it says unavailable. I understand that i can reformat and use the disk but i would like to recover any info that i have on the disk.

Any ideas where I could go next with this?

Thanks,

 

[inzone]

First thing you should know about formatting is that it does not erase data it just makes the drive available to be written over. The only time that you actually lose data is if it is written over , so formatting is not a bad thing or the end of your data.
You also can't format a disk unless it is initialized and partitioned so if your drive is showing up in disk management as raw unallocated space then you have lost the partition and a new one needs to be created before you can format.
At this piont you can try some of the free recovery software programs that are available to see if you can get anything from the drive and keep in mind that the data is going to still be there untill it's written over.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/how-recover-data-dead-or-erased-hard-drive-1C6690403

 

[lowman905]

Thanks for the quick reply. I stumbled across another post about something similar. It was too simple to solve. opened the case, reseated the sata cables and it worked. Dooh.

 

[inzone]

Noooo !