[SOLVED] HDD suddenly became unallocated

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teidullie

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My internal hdd all of sudden became unallocated space. Its only 3 years old and has been operating without a hitch ever since it was first installed. We recently had some power issues in the home, blackouts and brownouts which I think may have done it. I was searching for fixes as the data is still there since I have not tried to re partition the drive and everything brought me to these forums and a program called DMDE. Some people were able to fix this issue with a few clicks and others were not. I have installed DMDE on the machine in question but just need a bit of direction with that program.
 
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Ralston18

Ralston18

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Anything you do could cause permanent loss of data and/or additional loss of data.

Power outages certainly can and do cause any number of problems including corrupting disk drives. Data so affected may or may not be recoverable.

Update your post to include full system hardware specs.

Include PSU: make, model, wattage, age, condition?

Disk drive(s): make, model, capacity, how full? Especially the problem internal HDD.

Look in Reliability History and Event Viewer for error codes, warnings, and informational events related to the problem.

In the meantime, hold off on doing anything else.

DMDE free?

DMDE free has limits. FYI:

https://www.techradar.com/reviews/dmde-free-edition

For the most part consider the use of the drive's manufacturer's diagnostic tools. Check the drive manufacturer's website for such tools.

There may be other ideas and suggestions.
 
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teidullie

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Thanks for the responses, my full specs are

Motherboard: Asus B350F gaming
PSU: Seagate 700w bronze
HDD: 2 4TB Seagate drives, 1 4TB Western digital drive, 1 3TB Western digital drive
SSD: 120 TB Inland pro NVME
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050
RAM: 16GB Corsair LPM

The drive having the issues is the 3TB Western digital drive

Yes currently I only have DMDE free edition but I am willing to purchase the program if it can fix this issue, I will also look into Western digital's own tools and see if I can find anything. When opening what I believe is the partition view in DMDE free I am given this error.

https://photos.google.com/u/0/photo/AF1QipMDpf0uzMKPuks9c3jQnlgd4qAprPJX6iKggHEI

This is what I believe to be the partition view

https://photos.google.com/u/0/photo/AF1QipPHjJLBINRvQlRxpND3FfH096dfUbDRoiQhI-oW

Again I am not familiar with this DMDE program but I think I have linked the correct things you all were asking for.

Thanks again in advance for all your help.
 
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fzabkar

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Sep 22, 2010
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Your 3TB drive should have 5860533168 sectors. However, DMDE is reporting a physical size of 5860531055 sectors. That's a difference of 2113 sectors. This is caused by your Asus BIOS. It is stealing these sectors at the end of the drive to store a backup copy of itself. This also happens with some Gigabyte motherboards..

GigaByte BIOS bug results in loss of 1TB capacity:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=150

I expect that this happened because your 3TB drive was at one time promoted in the boot order. This could happen unintentionally if the boot drive is not detected by BIOS.

The above URL has various tools which can recover the full capacity of the drive.
 
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teidullie

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I have always booted from my NVME drive never from one of my HDD's those are only for storage on this PC. The drive is also detected in bios the problem is that it all of a sudden showed as unallocated space in windows. If this program DMDE shows my original file structure should I be able to restore the drive without data loss? In the screenshot that shows the partition data you can see the only folder on the drive is SD HD Movies (my dvd and blu ray rips). Is there a way to re allocate the drive without any data loss?
 
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fzabkar

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Can you show us the contents of LBAs 0, 1 and 2?

I need to see these sectors before I can recommend a fix.

The partition metadata on your 3TB drive is in fact damaged. Those 2113 sectors have overwritten the backup copy of the boot sector and partition metadata at the end of the drive.
 
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teidullie

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fzabkar said:
Can you show us the contents of LBAs 0, 1 and 2?

I need to see these sectors before I can recommend a fix.

The partition metadata on your 3TB drive is in fact damaged. Those 2113 sectors have overwritten the backup copy of the boot sector and partition metadata at the end of the drive.
Click to expand...

I'm not quite sure how to get to those are you able to tell me?
 
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fzabkar

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If you close the Partitions window, you will end up at LBA 0.

At this point select Mode -> Hexadecimal/Text.

Now you will see LBA 0 and LBA 1 in hex mode.

Scroll down and you will get to LBA 2.

You can either take screenshots, or you can select Edit -> Export to Text File. Do this for each LBA. You can copy and paste the text files into your next post.

Edit: Use the "code" BBcode when pasting your text to enable fixed width formatting.
 
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fzabkar

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