Hard Drive Erased? Can't be?!

[maschuld]

Hello all,

About 5 months ago I purchased a new hard drive and freshly installed windows on it, transferring my version from an older hard drive. I kept the old hard drive in the computer and moved it down in boot order. All was fine, UNTIL, Monday morning I awoke to find that my old hard drive had booted and it was up and running windows (slowly and painfully).

I could not longer access the files from my other hard drive. All I could see was a drive labeled "System Reserved" which was 100mb. The hard drive is actually 320gb.

Knowing I needed more space, I purchased another hard drive, reinstalled Windows, and then connected the old hard drive... same problem.

I ran test disk, and it shows none of the original file folders I'd expect. When I analyze, it says, "read error at 349/0/7." It finishes analyzing, but this does not accomplish much.

I tried recuva, and it finds no files to recover.

Any idea where I should go from here? I can't believe the drive would have randomly erased itself over night. Any ideas?

 

[dodger46]

Unfortunately drives can and do fail quite spectacularly. Seatools will check your drive and attempt to repair, but I wouldn't hold your breath!
http://www.seagate.com/support/external-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/freeagent-pro-classic/seatools-win-master/

 

[lonewolf7]

From here you could go to BIOS check to see if your drive is listed there showing the original capacity. If it is then there is a chance of data recovery all by yourself. I don't think the data is erased.

You could explore this link : http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

There are tons of free and paid data recovery software's out there try them.

What is the condition of your drive now, is it spinning, clicking?

 

[Susannah34213d]

Different data recovery software often would bring different data recovery results. Therefore, don’t be depressed.

Do not save anything else on this drive and give another data recovery software a chance.

As I know, there are still other data recovery freeware online that even works much more efficiently than some paid ones.

So, try to search one on the internet:
http://freeware-fix.blogspot.com/2013/03/external-hard-drive-unreadable.html

From this incident, you should always learn to keep at lease two copies of your important data on separate drives in case of similar troubles.

 

[maschuld]

Lessons learned. Thankfully most of our important documents are backed up, but we still risked losing recent work. BUT, GOOD NEWS. I used MiniTools PowerData Recovery, and I've been able to rescue all essential files. Thank you to everyone for their help.