Hard Drive problem

[HMA_Steve]

Just started my computer today and it came up saying 'press f10 for recovery' - suffice to say I poo'd my pants and hit f8 instead to select my start-up disk (c) (long shot but it booted). I can boot into windows but my second hard disk (d) is not working, its there but it just keeps saying it needs formatting as there is no file system present (was ntfs)! Any idea why this might have happened, motherboard or drive failure? BTW the drive is showing up in the drive management as healthy and active but I just can’t open it up without having to reformat it.

Luckily im pretty anal about backups so I haven’t lost anything but im guessing I can’t rely on this drive anymore?

Also I was going to update my bios but my computer does not have a floppy drive, is there a way of doing this with out one? (Stupid I know, don’t know why I didn’t have one put in)

Many thanks for any help!

[percydaman]

just a guess but you might have lost the partition on it. There are several file recovery programs that will probably retrieve most of the files on the hd.

[Blitterswitch]

Best one I have personally used is GetDataBack. There is a FAT and NTFS version.

[priad]

"easy recovery" here worked pretty well.

[HMA_Steve]

yeah thanks, i have got all the data but would you recommend replacing the drive now? do you reckon it was hardware related?

[suurland]

I would for sure not use the drive again, they are so cheap no a days that I would not be willing to take the risk.

/Thomas

[Blitterswitch]

Get a s.m.a.r.t. checker, it will give you a run down on the hd's health

[priad]

Get a s.m.a.r.t. checker, it will give you a run down on the hd's health

Could you say more about that?

[Blitterswitch]

download speedfan, it has this functionality built in. Its a really nice app.

[HMA_Steve]

cheers ill give that a look. Ordered a new drive, dont want to risk the one that failed.

[Bathyscaph]

I once lost a drive when the master file table was overwritten.

As I came to understand it, a perfectly healthy drive can be more or less wiped by overwriting this index of the drive's contents and for me there was no way to recover the information. A drive recovery place could manually piece together simple files like word, and excel documents but large binary files were mostly all toast.

It's good that you have it all backed up. You could probably reuse that drive just for storing disk images or other backup info just for the sake of irony.

[DaForce]

I too lost a 200GB drive to the MFT being overwritten partially.. so lots of cross linked files. Then eventually windows said the drive wasnt formatted. Using easy recovery pro and the RAW sector scan I got back about 30-40GB of full working files. Some quite large.

So it all depends on why teh HDD disappeared, but still.. better safe than sorry.
You can also download small programs from the HDD manufactorers website, All the main companys have these diagnostic programs. And will tell you if the drive is faulty or about to do. And if its in warranty you can get it replaced.