hard disk 'lost'

[dodgie]

 

[dodgie]

Two hard drives (C - 20G and D - 40G). Windows XP on drive C. Couple of times lately bios and xp fail to recognise the D drive properly - give it a garbled name. After running rescan in Computer Management in Admin Tools it would recognise it properly by name and files all OK. NOw its stopped doing that - XP describes "D drive as a 7.79G removable drive. Computer Management in Admin Tools says it is a healthy 7.79G drive with the rest of the 40G as 'unallocated space'. I have not formatted, repartioned, deleted etc. D was a single partition with lots of files - photos mainly.

Ran the maxtor diagnostics and it said bad sectors but little else. Ran Acronis Recovery and it says no missing partitions.

Appreciate advice. I'm assuming disk damage that has scrambled the directory and is misleading XP on partition size. Don't want to do too much until I know roughly what I am doing.

Thanks (in advance).....

 

[OritionX]

If you need the data off it get it now while you can sounds like the drive is going bad... It could also be a bad board on the drive seeing how it keeps changing size as far as the computer is concerned. Does the bios list the same size as windows is seeing?

 

[dodgie]

Bios lists it as a 40G drive. At least it did until tomight, when it ceased recognising it at all. No more 'removable disk'. No more disk.

Changed cables in case there was a fault there. Changed IDEs. No &&*^& luck.

Given that it isn't recognised in the BIOS I'm assuming now that the drive is cactus.

 

[dodgie]

SOLVED IT - depressed pin on the connector, must have been making partial contact and when I wiggled the cable to ensure it was in, lost contact altogether. Pulled it our with forceps, inserted cable carefully, IT RUNS. But took all the files off just in case..