[SOLVED] HDD seems to have randomly died?

[SMK-50]

Seemingly out of nowhere, windows stopped recognizing my HDD. It wasn't after downloading something, it wasn't after a shutdown or anything, just out of nowhere. When I tried to access the HDD, it said the "folder was empty". However windows still knew how much space was remaining on the drive. After rebooting, the file manager didn't even detect my HDD. A quick look in disk management showed that the drive appeared as "Unknown, not initialized". It also says the device has 0Gb for capacity (it's actually 1TB). When I tried to view the disk in diskpart, it said the drive was online but had a size of 0GB. Strangely enough, after I took another look into my PC and rebooted, then diskpart wasn't even showing the drive (although disk management still did). When I try to initialize the disk, it says the specified file cannot be found. So, is my drive dead? Do i need to hold a funeral?

 

[maks kuznia]

Did you check the connection of the HDD inside of the PC? How old is the HDD?

 

[PC Tailor]

Is it an external or internal HDD?
If Internal - you could always try a different SATA cable and port.
If external - it could just be the enclosure.

It will show 0GB if it is not initialized - but if there was data on it originally and has been used for some time, then suddenly goes to not initialized, it sure does sound like a funeral is in order. You can always try recovery software to pull off any important data.

 

[USAFRet]

Drives die. All of them eventually.
This may be one of the recently dead.

This is what backups and warranty is for.
Replace, and recover the data from your backup.

Engage the manufacturer for an RMA if under warranty, and do whatever tests they say.
If still under warranty, free replacement.
If past warranty, replace.


Drives are simply physical electronic devices. They fail.

 

[SMK-50]

The connections inside the PC are fine. The drive is about 5 years old. External HDD. None of the software ive downloaded can even detect the drive, so i cant pull off any info. Guess it's time for a funeral.

 

[popatim]

It's an external so you can open the enclosure and remove the drive inside it. Most of the large externals have a normal Sata HDD in them that you can connect up inside your pc to see if data is accessible.

The small pocket sized ones sometimes have a laptop sata drive in them and sometimes have a USB only drive in them.

Let us know what you find. 5yrs old you got nothing to lose

 

[SMK-50]

Thankfully everything lost was sentimental stuff anyway, nasty setback but life will go on. Thanks everyone.

 

[PC Tailor]

Thankfully everything lost was sentimental stuff anyway, nasty setback but life will go on. Thanks everyone.

As I said in my initial post and has been stated by others, if it is an external, it's usually more common for the enclosure PCB to fail.
In which case, if you have no warranty, you can open the enclosure, plug it into your computer directly with SATA cables and try to access it again.

 

[mdd1963]

Sentimental stuff is the most valuable, and loss of such data is what utilization of DropBox, OneDrive, P-Cloud, Box, and GoogleDrive and one or two external hard drives should eliminate....

If your naked clown photo collection (kidding, of course!) is of a sensitive nature, encrypt them easily first with Glary Utilities, 7 Zip, etc...