Secondary hard drive partition no longer visible, even at the bios level.

[SaltySpecula]

My computer has a couple of hard drives. The main one is split into two partitions, a single 100gig partition for Windows 7 and a few core essential programs and the rest as a secondary partition for general use. For the last two days though, this hard drive is no longer able to detect the general use partition, even in the Bios. All files and programs that led to it are reporting dead links that don't exist and any attempt to do something involving this general use partition locks up Windows and usually requires a forced restart of the computer or at least relogging into Windows. This partition is also not recognized in Disk Management either, there's nothing there, not even unallocated space.

If the entire hard drive had the same issue and both partitions vanished, I'd gladly say "well, looks like it's dead" ans go buy a new one but the fact that one partition (and the computer as a whole) still works just fine and the other partition doesn't makes me uncertain.

Are there any ways to try and recover this partition, or at least format it and use it again without destroying the other Windows Partition? The rest of the computer that doesn't involve that general use partition works just fine.

 

[popatim]

I would use testdisk and see if it see's the partition. If so it may even be able to recover it.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk