[SOLVED] Partitions have vanished, even in Disk Management

Feb 22, 2021
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Hello!

My son's laptop he uses for school and some gaming is on the fritz! Please help. It's a Windows 10 OS.

After a bunch of desktop shortcuts when blank and said they couldn't find the target, my child informed me he needed my "expert" help. So, I need help here in order to continue to be the wise man that can fix anything, in his eyes, at least!

I immediately opened a file folder to take a look at "This PC" and saw the partitions weren't being displayed.

I then went to Disk Management and while there are "Healthy Recovery Partitions" shown, which are presumably for each partition on the harddisk, the drives they belong to are gone. These drive should have been probably anywhere from 500 GB to 1 TB in size, and were labeled D and G.

I was hoping I could simply assign them a letter and have them be seen again, but Scooby said "rut-roh, Raggy" and there is now a mystery afoot.
I then restarted the computer. Nothing changed. Restarted again. No diff.

I opened Windows update and it said we're all up to date. I force-checked it and a slew of updates appeared, so we ran updates and restarted. Looking at the events viewer, many updates were not accomplished for an unknown reason. Went to updates again but only 2 were there. Updated those, restarted. No change.

I went to Restore and, of course, auto restore only had 2 points for me ... a point right before I updated and a point after I updated. Why set up auto-restores if it's never going to set restore points for me? WTH? So I went to sleep. That was all last night.

Today, I go through the whole gammit again, but this time there's a new restore point, back on Feb 11 2021. That's great! That's before this happened! It also shows that there are restore points in this one for particular partitions, too ... it says they exist, but it won't let me checkmark them to run a restore. Bleh.

So, I restore that date, it restarts, and then it says it couldn't restore it because my antivirus was interfering and that I had to turn it off and retry the restore. I do so.
Now the restore point is completely gone. I restart. It's still gone. I restart. Gone.

I'm pulling my hair out now, and I'm getting old and am a grisly veteran, so there's not a whole lot there.

Does anybody have an idea for me? Thank you so very much for any of your time that you can spare.

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Solution
Disk Management is showing a 128GB SSD. There is no 500GB - 1TB HDD. It seems that the HDD is not being detected.
try removing the hdd and replacing it assuming that you don't know how ill guide you through it on a laptop there are screws on the bottom casing flip your laptop and locate them. Normally those screws are Phillips and a small technical screwdriver should be able to unscrew them, there may be screws hidden underneath the feet (the anti skid pads) check if there are if yes remove them. Remove your laptop battery if possible the will be a ton of screws there then pull up gently the harddrive will look like a small thin rectangle nearby the optical drive (if one...
Feb 22, 2021
4
0
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As it turns out, I just discovered most of the problem, but unsure of the next step...

I went to Amazon to look at the Laptop I purchased to check the HDD size and it says:
"1 TB Hybrid HDD + 128GB SSD"

So, apparently I have an SSD I completely do not remember having, and it's functioning properly ...

But there's a "hybrid" HDD with two partitions that is malfunctioning and not detected.

Does a Hybrid mean the two disk drives are in one device? And if so, or even if not, what is the next step here?
 

laptop-Tech

Prominent
Jan 27, 2020
204
21
595
Disk Management is showing a 128GB SSD. There is no 500GB - 1TB HDD. It seems that the HDD is not being detected.
try removing the hdd and replacing it assuming that you don't know how ill guide you through it on a laptop there are screws on the bottom casing flip your laptop and locate them. Normally those screws are Phillips and a small technical screwdriver should be able to unscrew them, there may be screws hidden underneath the feet (the anti skid pads) check if there are if yes remove them. Remove your laptop battery if possible the will be a ton of screws there then pull up gently the harddrive will look like a small thin rectangle nearby the optical drive (if one equippped
3133069-2-l.jpg
 
Solution

laptop-Tech

Prominent
Jan 27, 2020
204
21
595
As it turns out, I just discovered most of the problem, but unsure of the next step...

I went to Amazon to look at the Laptop I purchased to check the HDD size and it says:
"1 TB Hybrid HDD + 128GB SSD"

So, apparently I have an SSD I completely do not remember having, and it's functioning properly ...

But there's a "hybrid" HDD with two partitions that is malfunctioning and not detected.

Does a Hybrid mean the two disk drives are in one device? And if so, or even if not, what is the next step here?
a hybrid hdd is sshd solid state hybrid drive it combines some small amount of flash memory with a Hard drive
 
Feb 22, 2021
4
0
10
Okay, so are you saying the only possible next step is completely replacing the HDD with another HDD, or are you saying to pull it out and stick it back in?