Question D drive inaccessible

[VikkiB]

Windows 10 updates appears to have upset my standalone music DAW computer after needing to put the computer online to download an AMP simulator program. Anyway to cut a long story short I restored the computer back to earlier date - pre the updates and then found my 'D' drive had been renamed 'I' so using AOMEI I renamed the drive and hey presto everything worked for about a couple of hours saved my work then shut down the computer as normal. When restarting my computer later the D drive is now inaccessible and restore will not work - any ideas please that don't want me to reformat as I have thousands of hours of data on my D drive and don't want to lose any of it? Please help somebody !!!

 

[VikkiB]

Hi
Tried all of the above including switching off defender (no virus detected) and changing driver letter from D to T - now my what was drive D says not initialised - have I lost my D drive content now? I am currently trying system restore again but doubt my D drive will come back - I used Windows own drive letter changer.
Thanks

 

[Steltek]

Change the drive letter back. Then, before you do anything else to make the situation worse, make a note of the hard drive manufacturer's name (i.e. Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Hitachi, etc) and the drive model number. Go to the manufacturer's support website, then download their diagnostic utility software to run a diagnostic check on the hard drive. If the diagnostic doesn't find anything physically wrong with the drive, you may be able to purchase and use data recovery software to recover the drive partition and data.

If the drive tests out as defective, your only choice at that point is to send it off to a data recovery company. If that turns out to be the case, you'll have to decide whether the data on the drive is worth the expense of attempting to recover it (which will end up being several hundred dollars or more at minimum, depending upon the company you use).

Finally, if this was important data, you should use it as a wake up call to establishing a reliable backup regimen for your data. Once you establish a budget for it, there are many very smart people here who will give you good advice on setting something reliable up.

 

[mindless1]

In addition to what Steltek wrote, I'd still try hooking it up to a different system.

There's also some freeware data recovery software out there, but I don't know what's best these days for free.

 

[VikkiB]

Change the drive letter back. Then, before you do anything else to make the situation worse, make a note of the hard drive manufacturer's name (i.e. Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Hitachi, etc) and the drive model number. Go to the manufacturer's support website, then download their diagnostic utility software to run a diagnostic check on the hard drive. If the diagnostic doesn't find anything physically wrong with the drive, you may be able to purchase and use data recovery software to recover the drive partition and data.

If the drive tests out as defective, your only choice at that point is to send it off to a data recovery company. If that turns out to be the case, you'll have to decide whether the data on the drive is worth the expense of attempting to recover it (which will end up being several hundred dollars or more at minimum, depending upon the company you use).

Finally, if this was important data, you should use it as a wake up call to establishing a reliable backup regimen for your data. Once you establish a budget for it, there are many very smart people here who will give you good advice on setting something reliable up.

Thank you for your reply - I will give it ago - not sure the costs fir recovery are worth it was just trying to save time on redirecting to another drive as would mean lots of downloading and I am not keen to put this standalone DAW on the Internet again as all this started when windows 10 downloaded updates while I was downloading an amp demo - so frustrating!!

 

[VikkiB]

In addition to what Steltek wrote, I'd still try hooking it up to a different system.

There's also some freeware data recovery software out there, but I don't know what's best these days for free.

Thanks - I have been looking at all the different data recovery softwares out there and it's a minefield - who knows which one is better than which one they all claim to be the best lol - I might have to scrap my d drive - never again will this DAW end up online - once has been bad enough 🙄🤔

 

[GrumpyMan]

I have never tried it but Recuva seems to work for some friends of mine who had that happen.

 

[VikkiB]

So - after taking a break from pulling my hair out after my D drive became unlabelled and apparently empty I decided to go into device manager and scan my drives for changes. At this point my unlabelled D drive vanished from the list and in a panic I shut down the computer and restarted. I am now back to all my drives being present and correctly labelled with all my files where they should be but my D drive is still inaccessible. I am going to switch it off again and reboot to make sure the D drive is still visible. If it is I am back to my original problem. I still need to access another computer to try my D drive in and all the other solutions I am worried about trying to rename the drive again now that I can see all my files again. Any ideas how I can make my D drive accessible again.

 

[Tech Junky]

2 things.

Put the affected drive into an enclosure
Use a Linux live cd on a USB drive to boot from

being "offline" and not in Windows will give you more of a chance with the drive. There are some data recovery options like TestDisk that can grab files from the actual sectors and copy them to a new location (drive). Once you have a backup then you can play around with the drive all you want until it kicks the bucket.

 

[VikkiB]

Hi
After much hair tearing and ignoring my computer for a short time I have solved my D drive issue. As you know I tried to rename the drive and the drive appeared to have lost everything!! I almost gave it up as a bad job. Then today I decided to look in device manager at my actual drives, I wanted to check which drive was defunct - I scanned my drives for cchanges and at this point the drive completely vanished so thinking all was lost I restarted the machine. Amazingly my D drive reappeared and although I could see my files again I was back to the D drive being inaccessible.
Studying what I could of the D drive I noted that all the folders were set to read only. I right clicked on each folder firstly to change the ownership in security which was currently 'unknown' to 'authenticated users' ensuring that the authority was applied to the folder and all subfolders, then unticked the read only box.
Restarted the computer. I have reclaimed my D drive. The files on C that need to access D had to be readviced but all is well again.
My files and D drive are now accessible. Thank you for all your help.

 

[Muadib]

Congrats! Now your next step is to backup your files ASAP!

 

[VikkiB]

Congrats! Now your next step is to backup your files ASAP!

Definitely need to do that - thanks!