Drive D: Disappears REPEATEDLY

[mgreen]

I have a Sony VAIO laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit with a single 500 GB hard drive. A year ago, when the computer was new, I used a free partition manager program (Partition Wizard maybe?) to allocate about 60 GB for drive C: which holds Windows 7 and all of my software apps. I allocated the rest of the free space to D: for all of my data files. Sony also has a 13GB recovery partition and a 100 MB System Reserved partition which preceed C: and D: on the hard drive.

Three days ago, when I booted the computer for the day, drive D: was gone. Disk Management showed free, unallocated space equal to the size of my missing drive D:. Using Sony live chat support, the technician used Disk Management to allocate the 400 GB of free space to D: and formatted the partition. I then restored my missing data from a backup.

The next day I booted my computer and drive D: was gone again. Disk Management again shows free, unallocated space equal to the size of my missing drive D:.

I have no third-party disk management software installed. Recent changes to my system include:

1) SmartSync Software recently downloaded a new version of SmartSync Pro (version 4.0) to my hard drive.

2) I ran Disk Cleanup on drive C:

Do you know what would cause drive D: to repeatedly disappear on boot up and how to fix the problem?

Thanks for your help!

 

[jamesmcuk]

The 100meg partition is by win 7 but its still very odd - I take it you have scanned the PC using anti virus software? Due to the nature of this I would be also tempted to scan for viruses using a boot CD/USB Flash Drive.

A good tool to use is YUMI http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

You simply select your flash drive and it has all the links to various Anti virus bootable environments for selection.

Then make your bios boot from the flash drive and scan your PC.

 

[mgreen]

Thanks for your reply! I used the link you provided to download the AVG and Kaspersky virus scanners to a USB flash drive. After booting from the USB stick, I scanned drive C: which found no problems. I tried to also run Kaspersky but got errors. Apparently there is a problem with the image on my USB stick.

I also booted Windows and performed a full system scan using Norton Internet Security 2012 which also found nothing.

I'll create a drive D: again, restore all my files again, and hope for the best.

Let me know if you have any other suggestions. Thanks again!

 

[mgreen]

The third sentence above should read: After booting from the USB stick, I scanned drive C: using AVG which found no problems.

 

[jamesmcuk]

Well if it goes again try using YUMI again and this time get Gparted on it. Create the D: Partition using that. You will have to set the Format as option of GParted from Ext2 to NTFS.

In Gparted nothing gets done as you do it you have to click the Apply button to actually commit the changes but you will see what I mean when you use it.

 

[mgreen]

I downloaded the .iso for Gparted Live 0.12.1-5 and burned a CD then booted from it. Gparted didn't recognize any partition table including my drive C: It reported all space on the physical hard drive as free and unallocated. I decided not to use Gparted because I was afraid it would destroy my C: partition since it couldn't recognize it.

On one of several reboots this evening, drive D: disappeared again with Disk Manager showing all its space as free and unallocated.

As another possible solution, I ran bootrec.exe /fixmbr from the Windows 7 install CD. Hopefully that will help. I then used Disk Manager to recreate the D: partition and restored all my files from backup. If the problem occurs again, I don't know what else to try.

 

[jamesmcuk]

WHat type of Partition are you creating? Primary - Extended etc.

 

[mgreen]

In Disk Management, I right-clicked on the free, unallocated space and selected "Create Partition" and selected drive letter D:. Disk Management lists it as a Logical Drive partition with the NTFS file system.

 

[jamesmcuk]

Well I can't select an option of Create Partition I get an Option of New Simple Volume on Unallocated Space as well as a few other such as New Raid etc. So without being able to test it myself I am kind of fresh out of ideas.

However I did a little googling to see if anyone had got a solution and it appears this guy did - maybe worth a look:

http://forums.techguy.org/windows-7/954964-solved-logical-partition-lost-after.html

 

[mgreen]

Best answer selected by mgreen.