Disappearing hard drive

[sinspider]

Yesterday i was using all my drives fine when i shut down. today i started my rig up to find my main storage drive is not appearing. when in administrative tools it asks me to initialise the drive. Except this drive was 80% full as a 1TB western digital drive. could this be a virus/bad sector/anything else issue?

 

[icy dock]

Hey Sinspider,

If the OS asked you to initialize, then most likely the data is gone. You can check by connecting the drive to another computer, but it probably will show the same screen. As far as what went wrong, its hard to say what exactly happened to it.

Sorry theres not much else there is I can add, hope this helps confirm your thoughts.

 

[PudgyChicken]

You should boot from an Ubuntu 10.10 live CD/flash drive and see if the contents of the drive are visible from inside of Ubuntu. Sometimes Windows just craps out, I've had it happen to me. If you can see the contents of the drive in Ubuntu, then run a fsck on it from a terminal.

 

[qFook]

Yesterday i was using all my drives fine when i shut down. today i started my rig up to find my main storage drive is not appearing. when in administrative tools it asks me to initialise the drive. Except this drive was 80% full as a 1TB western digital drive. could this be a virus/bad sector/anything else issue?

If you have a fairly recent motherboard running a Core 7 or Core 5 CPU in conjunction with an Intel Series 6 Express Chipset, then it is a possibility that the chipset has a design fault.

I had a similar problem after recently upgrading my PC when my hard drives started to disappear one by one over the course of a few days. After an exhaustive search for a solution I finally came upon an Intel page describing the fault, how to diagnose it and how to proceed.

Please see http://www.intel.com/consumer/products/processors/chipset.htm

On my motherboard, SATA port 1 continued to work, which had the OS installed on it, but ports 2-5 died one by one over the course of a few days. They would work again for short periods at a time after unplugging, waiting for the hard drives to cool a bit and then hot plugging them in again.

I emailed the place I purchased the board from, which is in Australia, attaching a Device Manager snapshot to confirm my chipset and a replacement motherboard was organised very quickly, no worries. I was surprised and appreciate the quick response and good service I received.

Hope this helps