AARG!! My harddrive!!!

[percydaman]

I have a second harddrive on my system. All of a sudden now it wont show up as a drive in windows explorer. Its not there! but it shows in the bios, and it DOES show in windows, but only in certain places like device manager, and system info. Ive taken it to another system with Win XP with the same results. Im very desperate as that drive has ALL my graphic files, textures etc

[losbellos]

I had this once, when certain hard disks meat they mess up something, but I was able to get the data back on other pc, maybe try an other one.
or even try from the boot disk, to see how is it.

[Biohazard]

Have a look at your peripheral management (system) / disk manager

If your disk is recognized but not mounted, that may mean that your partition is lost. Check there if there's still something your system can handle (info about unlocated or free space is here crucial).

Else, before doing ANYTHING else, give a try to a gooood restoration program. What is your partition, ntfs or fat32 ?

that may do the trick between loosing everything and being able to get all your datas back before formating the drive or throwing it to the garbage can.

[percydaman]

thanks for the reply. the drive was listed in disk management, but couldn't do anything with it. Im in the process of right now looking at demos of recovery software to see which I like best before I buy. So far they all seem to be able to see all of the files on the drive. I should be able to get most if not all of it back. though it might be a touch expensive.

[Da_elf]

i lost the file structure data on my 5 disk raid-5 array once. meaning sure it was seen by the bios but windows couldnt see it. i got myself something called restorer 2000 pro (its reeeeeeally cheap to get) and voila. i could recover my data

[percydaman]

im checking out a few programs right now. the restorer 2000 is one of them. but after scanning the drive, it appears very incomplete. the folder housing all my max scenes and other stuff shows up as empty so Im loathe to purchase it. A program called virtual lab is one im looking at right now as it appears to see everything I want to save, but it charges by the gigabyte (about $130 for the minimum that I want to save)

[jujubee]

never had anything like that- wonder if a virus could do something such as this to your system.

[percydaman]

ive lost a partition just once before. Funny I never thought then to try and find file recovery program then. This drive has YEARS worth of work, including all the scene files that Ive ever posted on this forum. So Im bound and determined to get it back.

[Da_elf]

mine screwed up when doing a defragment and for some reason the sstem rebooted while doing it. when it came back on the drive was gone

[Syclone1]

Percy I use a program called "Easy Recovery Pro" and for me it rocks for file recovery.

http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/

-dave

[Trapezium]

Don't forget to factor in the price of some form of mass backup. DVD burners are great and even the cheap ones work pretty well.