Where has my hard drive gone?

[wopwopjunkie]

Hi all,

I've recently reinstalled windows 7, after this I seem to have lost my main storage drive. It's showing up in the Bios and in Disk Management but not in Windows Explorer. I'm unable to assign a drive letter in Disc Management and it appears to be saying that the hard drive is 4gig and has a partition. I'd really like to get the files from this drive rather than formatting. Please help.

See image of Disc Management...

 

[benji720]

It's showing that your HD is 4TB, not 4GB. If that's incorrect, you have a REAL problem.

I'd try running Recuva, which is a good free data recovery program. You can try that first and if that doesn't turn up your data, you can try testdisk which is more powerful but more advanced. You can google both these programs for download links.

 

[wopwopjunkie]

Lol, yeah 4TB. Strangely it's only 2 TB hard drive. Thanks for the advice. I've tried a quick scan on Recuva but nothing. Maybe a deep scan will work.

 

[benji720]

Yeah, that's a good place to go next. Eventually you'll need to reformat the drive (although if it's being shown as a 4TB drive that's seriously bad news for the health of the drive - I've never even heard of a drive being shown as a larger capacity in disk management.) You can try maybe plugging it into another computer using a SATA-USB cable like this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812232002

Definitely worth a shot if you don't have a backup.

 

[wopwopjunkie]

Thanks for the follow up post. I've decided to buy a similar product to the one you suggested and go that root for now.

 

[wopwopjunkie]

... the Bios and Device Manager both show the hard drive to be 2TB, it's only the disc management that's showing 4TB.

 

[fzabkar]

Is it possible that you have two drives connected in JBOD mode in your BIOS? For example, you might have one working 2TB drive plus a second faulty drive which is reporting a bogus 2048 GiB capacity?

Some faulty drives will report an all-ones LBA count, ie 0xFFFFFFFFFFFF. This equates to 2TiB rather than 2TB.

 

[benji720]

OK - good luck!

 

[wopwopjunkie]

Hi fzabkar, thanks for your input. I don't fully understand your question but... the other drives I have installed are all working fine.

 

[wopwopjunkie]

Hi benji720, thanks for all your advice.
I 'd tried the software you recommended and Recuva didn't seem to be able to find the drive at all. I then tried testdisc and I was able to see the folders on the hard drive but when trying to copy the files it came back with lots of error messages and corrupt file messages etc. It also didn't seem to copy anything. I then tried testdisc again the next day and realized it had copied my files but not to where I had expected. I've now in the process of copying everything onto my other hard drives and It seems a few of the files are corrupt but not many of the important ones. Result!

 

[wopwopjunkie]

I do have another question or 2 (maybe I should start another thread) How will I know if the hard drive is faulty? It's still under warranty and I'd like a replacement. Advice?

 

[fzabkar]

@wopwopjunkie, when you connect two or more drives in JBOD mode, they are concatenated by the RAID controller and then appear to the OS as one large physical drive. So if you had two 2TB drives in JBOD mode, then the OS would see a single 4TB drive, ie 2 x 1.8TiB. If one of these drives fails, then the OS might see a different capacity. A typical failure mode of WD drives, for example, is that they report a bogus capacity of 2TiB. In such a case your damaged JBOD array would then report a total capacity of 1.8TiB + 2TiB.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-RAID_drive_architectures#JBOD

 

[wopwopjunkie]

@fzabkar, thanks for the explanation. BBOD = just a bunch of drives - Brilliant!

 

[benji720]

What is the model and manufacturer of your drive?

 

[wopwopjunkie]

Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (WD2002FAEX) - 5 year warranty purchased April 2011

 

[benji720]

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=606&sid=3

Try that (it should work with all WD drives.) If it the drive has an error, it will give you an error code and you can RMA it to WD. I RMA a bunch of drives every year to all manufacturers and WD is one of the easier to work with. Good luck!

 

[wopwopjunkie]

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=606&sid=3

Try that (it should work with all WD drives.) If it the drive has an error, it will give you an error code and you can RMA it to WD. I RMA a bunch of drives every year to all manufacturers and WD is one of the easier to work with. Good luck!

Thanks again for your advice. I have run the Data Lifeguard Diagnostics tests, both quick and extended and the drive passed both! The drive is still not visible on Windows Explorer and appears the same in Disk Management i.e no drive letter and showing 2 partitions adding up to around 4 TB. I have also purchased another 2 TB hard drive and this is showing up correctly in both Windows Explorer and Disc Management. I've tried the problematic drive in different sockets on the motherboard and also in an external caddie all with the same results.

If you have any more advice of what to do it would be greatly appreciated.

 

[fzabkar]

I would use a disc editor (in readonly mode) to examine sector 0. That's where the partition information is stored (for MBR partitions). If you can post the contents of sector 0 (in hexadecimal mode), then one of us may be able to help you.

Roadkil's Sector Editor:
http://www.roadkil.net/program.php/P24/Sector%20Editor

HxD - Freeware Hex Editor and Disk Editor:
http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd

DMDE (DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery):
http://softdm.com/download.html

 

[wopwopjunkie]

Thanks fzabkar,

Thanks for the post and information, I'm sorry it has taken me so long to reply.

I used HxD and I think I have the information you asked for:

http://postimage.org/image/jqobrmw8r/

 

[fzabkar]

There is a single entry in the partition table at offset 0x1BE - 0x1CD.

It is telling us that the drive has a single NTFS partition (type 0x07), starting at sector 2048 (= 0x800), with a size of 2,000,396,746,752 bytes (= 0xe8e07800 x 512).

http://www.google.com/search?q=0xe8e07800+x+512+in+decimal

 

[wopwopjunkie]

Thanks again, I really do appreciate your efforts.
Now, I'm really not sure where to begin with a reply. All I heard was a whooshing sound as the words went over my head.
What do I have to do so this drive shows up in windows explorer as a 2 TB drive and is usable?

 

[fzabkar]

HxD is telling us that the subject drive has 3907029168 sectors. That works out to a total capacity of 1863.02 GB.

3 907 029 168 x 512 bytes = 1 863.01669 gigabytes

http://www.google.com/search?q=3907029168+x+512+bytes+in+gigabytes

This figure corresponds to the size of the first partition of Disk 2, as reported by Disk Management.

However, Disk Management is identifying this partition as a GPT Protective Partition whereas the partition type is clearly MBR, not GPT. If it were a GPT Protective Partition, then its partition ID would be 0xEE, not 0x07 as we have observed.

List of partition identifiers for PCs:
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html

BTW, the total number of sectors reported by HxD is consistent with WD's datasheet:
www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771434.pdf

Can you now show us the contents of the boot sector (sector 2048)?

 

[wopwopjunkie]

Sector 2048...

http://postimage.org/image/4gt0ggkkz/

 

[fzabkar]

That's showing a standard NTFS boot sector. The size of the volume is 0xE8E077FF which is 1 less than the size in the partition table. That is as it should be. The volume begins at sector 2048 and the sector size is 512 bytes. Once again this matches the partition table.

In short, I don't see anything out of the ordinary for this drive. It looks just like a single, basic 1.8TiB NTFS MBR volume. ISTM that if you installed it in another machine, or installed it in a USB enclosure, you would have access to your data.

You could confirm the disk layout by dropping back to a CMD Prompt and typing ...

DISKPART
LIST DISK

There are other commands (detail disk, detail partition, detail volume, list partition, list volume) that may shed more light on the problem.

Here are some references which I found useful:

An Examination of the Windows 7 VBR (Volume Boot Record):
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/W7VBR.htm

An Examination of the NTFS Volume Boot Record of Win2K and Win XP:
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/NTFSBR.htm

An Examination of the Windows 7 MBR:
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/W7MBR.htm

An Examination of Windows 7 and 8 GPT 'Protective' MBR and EFI Partitions:
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/GPT.htm

A Description of the Diskpart Command-Line Utility:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415

 

[wopwopjunkie]

That's showing a standard NTFS boot sector. The size of the volume is 0xE8E077FF which is 1 less than the size in the partition table. That is as it should be. The volume begins at sector 2048 and the sector size is 512 bytes. Once again this matches the partition table.

In short, I don't see anything out of the ordinary for this drive. It looks just like a single, basic 1.8TiB NTFS MBR volume. ISTM that if you installed it in another machine, or installed it in a USB enclosure, you would have access to your data.

You could confirm the disk layout by dropping back to a CMD Prompt and typing ...

DISKPART
LIST DISK

There are other commands (detail disk, detail partition, detail volume, list partition, list volume) that may shed more light on the problem.

Here are some references which I found useful:

An Examination of the Windows 7 VBR (Volume Boot Record):
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/W7VBR.htm

An Examination of the NTFS Volume Boot Record of Win2K and Win XP:
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/NTFSBR.htm

An Examination of the Windows 7 MBR:
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/W7MBR.htm

An Examination of Windows 7 and 8 GPT 'Protective' MBR and EFI Partitions:
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/GPT.htm

A Description of the Diskpart Command-Line Utility:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415

Thanks again fzabkar for all you efforts.

I have been trying out your suggestions and I will post these later if necessary.


I believe I have made an error of posting the wrong disc information when using HxD.


Sector 0 should have been...

http://postimage.org/image/e02qxoptx/



and Sector 2048 should have been

http://postimage.org/image/uogrd79jl/