Can't open hard drive all of a sudden

[Chris_496]

Hello everybody,

I run Windows 7 on an SSD, and I also have two SATA hard drives connected. It worked perfectly for years, but in all of a sudden, I can't open one of the drives (the D: drive). When I try to open it, Windows says "this drive needs to be formatted". Obviously I don't want that, as the drive contains lots of music projects. When I open Disk Management, Windows does recognize the drive, but it also sees a 100mb partition with the message "reserved by system".

Man, what can I do to fix this? This is really bumming me out! Any help is greatly appreciated!

UPDATE: I downloaded Crystal to analyze the disk, and it seems bad:

Is there anything I can do to save my data?

 

[RyanTodd1]

Hello everybody,

I run Windows 7 on an SSD, and I also have two SATA hard drives connected. It worked perfectly for years, but in all of a sudden, I can't open one of the drives (the D: drive). When I try to open it, Windows says "this drive needs to be formatted". Obviously I don't want that, as the drive contains lots of music projects. When I open Disk Management, Windows does recognize the drive, but it also sees a 100mb partition with the message "reserved by system".

Man, what can I do to fix this? This is really bumming me out! Any help is greatly appreciated!

UPDATE: I downloaded Crystal to analyze the disk, and it seems bad:

Is there anything I can do to save my data?

Hi,

Have you tried physically removing the HDD (safely with the PC turned off and all static removed) and then reattaching it. I remember this happening with mine when i played a game and i simply reattached it to the system and up popped everything again.

Since it is saying that you need to format the drive, that tells me that it may have already formatted itself. It is normal for the partition to sometimes stay on the system however you shouldnt be able to access it.

If you go to Disk Management does it come up as one solid partition or does it still have all its partition and appears to be correctly split for data storage? Can you send a screenshot of the Disk Management page and just highlight the faulty drive?

 

[Chris_496]

Hi RyanTodd, thanks for your reply. I did try to reconnect the HDD with a different cable, but it didn't work. When I go do disk management I see this (the broken drive is D):

The partition of 100MB one next to C: I may have accidentally created trying trying to fix this issue. The properties windows on the right is from the broken HDD, showing 0 bytes, whereas disk management does display the correct 1000GB...

 

[RyanTodd1]

Well it doesnt seem to have reformatted itself which is good news, usually the partition turns a solid black if the drive has been formatted. Ill have a think throughout today and try and find what the issue could be!

In fact for now, id see if there are any drivers that you are missing that you would need in order for this to work, if not have you got another PC you can try plugging the drive in to and see if it comes up then?

Seems very strange that it says you have the full TB on disk management but on the details tab it essentially says it cannot see any space on there at all. Sounds like corruption to me but ill think on it.

 

[Chris_496]

Today I delivered my disk to a data recovery center. The risk is too big when trying to retrieve it myself.

To avoid having these issues in the future, I want to set up a RAID 1 configuration, while running Windows 7 on my SSD. What happens when the SSD dies and I want to put my RAID 1 drives in a new system (say Windows 10)? Does all data transfer or will I have trouble with controllers or drivers?

 

[RyanTodd1]

Today I delivered my disk to a data recovery center. The risk is too big when trying to retrieve it myself.

To avoid having these issues in the future, I want to set up a RAID 1 configuration, while running Windows 7 on my SSD. What happens when the SSD dies and I want to put my RAID 1 drives in a new system (say Windows 10)? Does all data transfer or will I have trouble with controllers or drivers?

Im more inclined to agree with you on that one. Better to be safe than sorry, hopefully all goes well!

When using RAID 1, all youre doing is mirroring one drive to the other. If your SSD dies with your OS the only thing you lose is your OS. Worst case scenario is that you need a new SSD and therefore youll need your win 7 product key, which you can find using Magical Jelly bean if you dont have it already. As for all other data, youll have all your files, apps and just about everything else that you have on the drives, thats exactly what RAID 1 is all about - Redundancy!