Hard Drive Became Unallocated

[MeepsterNotchy]

Help! My Maxtor hard drive just turned to all Unallocated! It has 100% health score so I don't know at this point. It was hooked up via USB converter and was copying the data to my laptop when it says Delayed Write(or Read) Error I:\$Mft was not saved and data has been lost and the same thing for K: partition. I checked the connections and they were all good. I have it hooked up as a secondary internal right now and it still says Unallocated.

The sad thing is, IT WAS THE BACKUP DRIVE because the original just died. 🙁

 

[Chicano]

Two options:

• From Disk Management; if the USB HDD doesn't have drive letters, assign them...

• Open a Command Prompt windows as Administrator and Run CHKDSK X: /R (where X is the drive letter) on each USB HDD partition


How to Open the Command Prompt as Administrator in Windows 8 or 10
http://www.howtogeek.com/194041/how-to-open-the-command-prompt-as-administrator-in-windows-8.1/

How to Open Elevated or Admin Command Prompt in Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 10
http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/open-elevated-command-prompt-windows/

 

[MeepsterNotchy]

Two options:

• From Disk Management; if the USB HDD doesn't have drive letters, assign them...

• Open a Command Prompt windows as Administrator and Run CHKDSK X: /R (where X is the drive letter) on each USB HDD partition


How to Open the Command Prompt as Administrator in Windows 8 or 10
http://www.howtogeek.com/194041/how-to-open-the-command-prompt-as-administrator-in-windows-8.1/

How to Open Elevated or Admin Command Prompt in Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 10
http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/open-elevated-command-prompt-windows/

I used a recovery software and surprisingly it worked! On,y one partition was unrecoverable.

 

[Chicano]

If the HDD was working perfectly before this happened, all partitions should be recoverable.. try the options I mentioned and if necessary after that, try Disk Genius (included in the Hiren's Boot CD/USB).

• From Disk Management; if the USB HDD doesn't have drive letters, assign them...
• Open a Command Prompt windows as Administrator and Run CHKDSK X: /R (where X is the drive letter) on each USB HDD partition
• Fix the MBR Master Boot Record and recover files with Disk Genius.

Some people say HDDs can suddenly fail irretrievably.. but I haven't seen that ever happen, so who knows if they just didn't try hard enough to recover the HDD or their data... or I may have been lucky or tried harder to recover.

In my experience HDDs/Partitions may start going raw or have access issues, and eventually, from days to weeks, they can become unaccessible from Windows and later become unrecoverable.

But that doesn't mean your hdd is in such situation... if this is the first time it becomes raw, it can probably be restored by either of the options I mentioned, and it may keep working normally for some time, and it may have the same issue again a few more times before it worsens so you should have time to backup and replace.