Question Hard Disk Disappeared

[Gubby24]

Hello Guys,

Weird thing happened a few days ago.
My Hard Drive .. partitions disappeared in Windows.

I have a SSD that holds C: (Windows) and D: (some frequently used stuff)
I have a HDD that held E: I am not sure if there was also an F: ? I don't think so.

Anyway, I was downloading something directly to E: and I noticed the download had stopped.
I tried to resume it, it wouldn't work. I thought to myself, "A restart is in order"

Unfortunately after the restart I saw a message from Dropbox saying "You moved your dropbox location, it used to be E:\Dropbox"

When I opened my Computer, my E: is nowhere to be found 🙁
When I open Device Manager, my Hard Drive is still there.
I paid attention to the sounds my computer makes, there doesn't seem to be any signs of troubles in the Hard Drive. No Click Click / seeking sounds.

When I go to Administrative Tools / Storage, it says my Hard Drive is not Initialized.

I've read some things here: 6 Ways to Fix Disk Unknown Not Initialized in Windows 10/8/7 - EaseUS but I have tried their soft before to recover data and it does not do what they advertise. So I don't really trust them.

Can you guys tell me if there is a way to attempt to recover my Partitions / My Data before I do anything that will forever make them unrecoverable ?

I would at least like to see the content..
I don't keep pictures or personal videos on hard drive .. so all the content should be re-acquirable.. just I don't even remember what I had on it.


Thank you in advance for your assistance on this.
I use Windows 7

 

[OrlyP]

First things first... unless you know exactly what you're doing, don't make any changes to the drive... initialize, format, etc. Needless to say, every move you make from now on should be planned and calculated.

In all appearances, it seems that the MBR was trashed. If reinserting the SATA and power cables don't help, it's time to look at partition repair utilities.

I'm partial towards Acronis because I have had great success with their disk cloning software. I also have EaseUS Todo Backup. To their credit, the product works.

You'll just have to choose your poison.

At any rate, most trial versions of these commercial utilities allows you to non-destructively analyze the disk for partitions. It's up to you if what you find are still worth recovering (and hence, paying for a subscription or license).

If all you have there are downloaded pieces of files, I'll just nuke the whole thing and re-provision it as if it's a new drive.

 

[Gubby24]

Thank you for your feedback.

I did not do anything to the hard, waiting for some expert advise.
Somehow I missed the email notification when you answered.

I will try the two softs you've suggested and see what they say.

I was also thinking of going with the hard to a different computer and see if another system maybe does not have any problem reading the files.
I was thinking of maybe looking for someone with Linux to see if they can see the content..

Anyway I'll let you know how it goes.

 

[Gubby24]

Update on this,

I've tried both Acronis and Ease US products. None of them can see the content on the Hard disk, and both say "it's not usable" while they do detect it as a Hard Disk that is present.

 

[USAFRet]

Can you show us a screencap of the Disk Management window?

(and this is specifically what backups are for.

 

[fzabkar]

Can you retrieve a SMART report with CrystalDiskInfo?

 

[Gubby24]

Hey Guys,

It's a cristmas miracle.

A lightbulb burned out in my house and triggered my circuit breakers to.. break.
When I went back to the PC I noticed there was no dropbox error after restart. I didn't even dare to hope, but i opened My Computer and my Hard Drive was back, as if nothing had happened.

I moved everything to external storage and then replaced the hard drive as I had already purchased a replacement.

Thank you everyone for chiming in, I guess sometimes we do get lucky