[SOLVED] Hard Disk visible but not useable after returning from trip

[JohnnyArson]

Just came back to the US from a week long trip overseas. When I fired up my desktop initially everything seemed fine. I have a 2TB hard drive where all my games and apps are stored, and a 120GB SSD for my OS and other smaller files. Upon trying to download the Halo: MCC, I discovered there is a problem with my 2TB drive.

The 2TB drive shows up in disk manager as RAW format. From my understanding this may indicate that the disk has bad sectors or is corrupted in some way. When I try to format it, I get an error message saying the specified device doesn't exist.

I've just about exhausted my Google-fu and this is probably my last resort before biting the bullet and buying a new HDD. I don't need to recover the data on the disk as it was mostly just games that can be re-downloaded but I'd prefer not to have to buy a new drive if I can find a way to successfully format this one.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Grobe]

The disk are probably defect.

One last resort you may try out: Go and download a Linux distro (Mint, Ubuntu, etc. will do just good). Make a bootable DVD or USB stick from the iso file, and then boot your computer using this usb/dvd image.

Then you'll be able to access those partitions (unless encrypted in any way).

Also, in contrary to windows, most Linux distros are equiped with a tool named "disks". This tool is capable of reading out the s.m.a.r.t. values from disks, that should confirm that the disk are defect.