Hard drive has vanished

[sycho1981]

Hi, I recently had a virus on my computer that as far as i know only affected my c and d drives (they vanished). after formatting my existing hard drive and installing a new one, i rebooted my pc. Everything worked fine but my f drive was acting strangely, no big deal i thought, until today when it vanished then made my pc stop loading windows altogether. I've tried disconnecting and reconnecting it to no avail, I've tried loading windows and then connecting it, it still doesnt show until i do a new hardware scan but then after i try and do anything with it the program im using crashes. Ive scanned my pc with kaspersky and there doesnt seem to be anything left. can you help please?

 

I'm using microsoft windows xp sp3. The drive is a western digital 500gb sata

 

Thanks Si

[Guest Wolfeymole]

Hi sycho

 

Welcome to FPCH

 

So this apparent virus completely obliterated Windows yes?

 

So you formatted the original hard drive which would definitely have obliterated Windows, what did you do with the drive then, leave it in the machine or remove it?

 

You say you then installed a new drive and rebooted and all was fine.

 

This where it becomes confusing you see because you have made no mention yet of reinstalling Windows whatsoever but your F: drive was acting strangely.

 

F: would be the logical drive letter in that chain presuming the optical drive was E:

 

Which drive did you eventually try to install Windows to, was it the original drive or the new F: drive?

[Dalo Harkin]

You also say that it is just one drive - so have you partitioned the drive into 3 or 4 parts?

[sycho1981]

Sorry guys,

To clarify, I run 4 drives in my pc (c-my system drive, d, e and f with 1 partition on each), the only drive that got changed in all of it was my c drive and the virus didnt completely wipe out windows but I couldn't access my c or d drives (except for the my documents folder strangely).

 

After formatting the original c drive i removed it and swapped it with my housemates larger one and installed windows on that one (my new c drive) with no issues whatsoever, my d drive reappeared and my other e drive worked like it should.

 

I didnt attach my f drive for about a week after because i had to get the leads but when i did it started acting weirdly (taking a long time to do simple tasks etc) and eventually stopped me accessing it and asking if i wanted to format before vanishing altogether.

[Dalo Harkin]

Ok - when you do a reinstall of windows and you have more than 1 disk you need to reactivate the other disks via the admin tools.

control panel>administrative tools>computer management>disk management.

from there you will see all your drives and you just right click on the ones not showing and click 'activate' :)

[sycho1981]

Yeah unfortunately i've done that already, the f drive doesnt even appear in the list, the only time it registers is on the first screen when im booting, after that, nothing.

[Dalo Harkin]

Is it connected directly to the MOBO or via a PCI device?

[Tony D]

I didnt attach my f drive for about a week after because i had to get the leads but when i did it started acting weirdly (taking a long time to do simple tasks etc) and eventually stopped me accessing it and asking if i wanted to format before vanishing altogether.

 

That sounds like a hard drive failure.

[RandyL]

It shows on the first screen? Do you mean it shows on the POST screen? I take that to mean it might show up in the BIOS. Have you checked to see if it shows there?

 

If the F drive doesn't show in My Computer or Computer Management then check to see if it shows in the BIOS.

 

If not and based on the fact that you also said that the F drive was acting strangely before and took a long time to do anything and then vanished all together and you said everything else works ok I would say the drive is nearly dead or completely dead.

 

A virus would not affect a drive with no OS on it. It would only affect a drive with Windows on it. Your F drive appears to have failed. Disconnect it and everything should be ok.

[sycho1981]

@ Dalo Harkin

It's connected straight to the mobo

 

@ RandyL

It shows on the very first screen when I turn on my pc (the one where it runs down what drives,usb's etc are connected).

Haven't checked the bios yet but I will when I get home.

 

Coincidentally I attached my f drive again this morning (out if hope more than anything else) and instaed of freezing as per usual it when to the consistency checking screen, it started showing me a load of sector errors bit I had to leave for work so I don't know the outcome of that yet.

 

Out of interest, if my drive is dead? Can anything be done or should I start shopping for a new one?

[Dalo Harkin]

Ok, its connected to the MOBO and was giving a load of sector errors - 99% of the time start shopping, but let us know what it says when you get home.

[Tony D]

Copy all that you can off the drive. It's on it's last leg.

[Seth]

Copy all that you can off the drive. It's on it's last leg.

 

Agreed.

[sycho1981]

Ok, on arriving home my pc had frozen on the 'windows is starting' screen, gonna run it again see what happens. Have checked my bios and the drive is visible.

[Tony D]

The drive can be visible in the BIOS and still not function properly. The BIOS just recognizes that a drive is present. If there's a problem with the actual media or the heads and mechanism that accesses the media, the BIOS wouldn't recognize that type of problem.

 

The problem with the media or access mechanism will show up when you actually try to access the data on the disk.

[sycho1981]

Ok, so after around 2 hours of consitency checking and about another 45 minutes of waiting for stuff to load, i finally managed to get to the disk management window (though every mouse click took around 5 minutes) and tried to format my f drive.

 

After around another 10 minutes i got a message saying that the format couldn't be completed at which point the f drive dissappeared from the list and my computer started running as normal, I've not tried to do anything else as yet as i cant go through that again tonight just to get my computer to boot

 

*update* after rescannig my hardware in device manager i managed to get the drive to show, i quickly deleted the partition on it and tried to setup another one at which point i got the same error message as before and the drive vanished again

Edited September 16, 2008 by sycho1981

[Dalo Harkin]

It's toast mate :eek: - get shopping :(

[sycho1981]

Rats! Well i'm managing to retrieve the missing data so it's not all bad i guess.

 

Thanks to everyone who took the time to help me out, i'll be suggesting this site to my friends

[Dalo Harkin]

Another plus is that drives are now a lot cheaper than they used to be you can get a 1TB SATA II for under £100 :eek:

[sycho1981]

Interesting... Cheer Dalo. Does anyone know why my faulty drive is still showing up in device manager and working properly (according to windows). Is there any way to retrieve files even from a drive thats not shown in windows?

[Guest Wolfeymole]

Another example of why it may show in the bios sycho is like a cdrom drive where the optical lens or drive mechanism has failed, the bios sees it but it won't work for these very reasons.

The drive is physically connected and nothing more and that is why the bios sees it.

[sycho1981]

I see.. Time to stop living in denial i think, farewell hd :(

[Guest Wolfeymole]

Like we always to say to people on a regular basis, back up, back up and back up.

 

Then just put it down to learning and experience.

[sycho1981]

You know, I've had a pc for many years and never backed anything up but as things have been messing up lately i think it might be time. Do you have any useful links to guides or software?

 

And sorry bout the other thing, thats my bad

Edited September 18, 2008 by sycho1981

[Guest Wolfeymole]

Well I see your running MCE (Media Centre Edition), or that is what you have reported as your Operating System.

Does your system have a recover partition and if so did you make any recovery disks.