hdd drive erased ?

[jonnyss]

i have 2 hdd drives c+d in my pc running xp media center, both 160gb one of them is for the operating system and programs and to download stuff to then move it to the other etc and the other had music, film and photos on it.

i decided to defrag drive c but it said chkdsk is scheduled to run so i restarted the pc and let chkdsk run, however it would just run, complete, reboot and run again and again and again, i stopped it and got the screen with safe mode, safe with networking, start with last known good configuration that worked or start normally.

i first started normaly but it went into the chkdsk again and again it continued to loop again

so i then used the last known working one and it booted to windows ok, however when it did i notice it had found new hardware namely my d drive, so i go to that and it says the drive is not formatted which is odd cos it had about 100 gb of stuff on it.

in disk management it now shows the d drive with 2 partitions, one of which is 16gb unallocated and the other as 149gb healthy but no file system (it was ntfs) and 100% free space.

has chkdsk done this ?

alot of the stuff on there is irreplasible

any ideas on this cos i really have lost the plot with it

[Plastic Nev]

First thing would be to make sure the system or yourself can not send any fresh data to that D drive. I would disconnect myself. There are file recovery programs which may be able to find your missing files on the disk if they aren't written over.

I don't know enough to go further so I advise waiting for one of our other more technical members to try and sort out why this happened in the first place, and also a recommendation of file recovery software.

Nev.

[Synapse]

It may be that the drive is failing. Chkdsk will never interfere with partitions or files, but when a disk is failing, and chkdsk is attempting to repair errors or mark bad sectors it can continue chasing a failing drive. The answer is STOP right there.

 

Find out what make of drive you have by taking the side cover off an having a look, or checking in the BIOS and download the diagnostics CD ISO, burn it on another PC and boot from it, then check the disc health. If you need more info on what to download, post the drive make and model.

 

After that is done, we are better placed to advise on where to go from there.

 

If the disc is showing ok, there is a chkdsk marker in the registry which can be turned off, stopping the cycling, then from there I guess its time to work out what has happened to your partitions.

[jonnyss]

its a seagate drive, i will download the diagnostics for it, can i just run the iso from a virtual drive?

thing is chkdsk was only supposed to check vol c and didnt do d, but befor the event there was only 1 partition on the disk and after there are 2, now i didnt create that, and thats because i dont know how to

i have to say that something similer happened before after i replaced the ide cable and the drive wouldnt show up, and when it did it said it wasnt formatted, stupidly i formatted it and lost quite a bit, i used eurasus or somthing which did get the photos back ok and a few music tracks but the rest was corrupt so i started again

[Synapse]

You'll have to boot from the CD rather than use a virtual drive. The diagnostics needs to run without Windows running.