Hard Drive partition disappeared..

[TAScythe]

I have a Maxtor 200GB ATA 133 8mb as my secondary storage hard drive. To day I noticed it was not showing up, the computer had not been rebooted for weeks and nothing had changed. I went to the disk manager and it showed it there with an red X saying it was not initialized, and where the partition should be it said "Unallocated space" if I right click it and initialized it it then wants me to format what it thinks is an unpartitioned hard drive. This drive was almost completely full with data that is irreplaceable...any help would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: Yes I have tried rebooting, changing IDE cables and ports.

 

[CalvinHobbes]

Initializing it should not format it. It should just write a signature to the drive.

 

[TAScythe]

No it doesn't but after it does, it shows the drive as blank with no parition...the the only thing left to do is partition and format.

 

[spec74]

This happened to my on my HD when i first got it. All your data is still there. I'm not sure what the prob was but when i put it into another comp all my data was there. Then later I took it back to the comp that lost all my data says it's not partitioned. To keep the story short I formatted the comp and installed new windows and all my data was readable from the comp. It's the windows problem i think.

 

[TAScythe]

I have no other computer to throw it into...anyone have any ideas on what windows deal is? THis happened from like one ngith to the next...kinda strange.

 

[CalvinHobbes]

Are you sure it's just that it's not showing a drive letter? See if you can assign a drive letter to the drive. Also get the properties to see if Windows sees the file system on the drive.

 

[TAScythe]

that's the problem...it doesn't even show a partition at all...it sees it as an unpartitioned unformatted drive....which means it couldn't have a drive letter.

 

[CalvinHobbes]

What file system was on the disk? Was it a "basic" disk or "dynamic"?
Maybe the partition table is corrupt, maybe it can be rebuilt.

One option would be to use a recovery tool to get all the data off of the drive. I've used a program called GetDataBack to recovery all the files from a HD that was showing up the same way.

 

[TAScythe]

it was basic using NTFS.

 

[TAScythe]

Also, for some reason disk manager sees it as a 128gb hard drive instead of a 200gb hard drive. Ironic as it is all my data recovery tools are on that hard drive..

 

[TAScythe]

ok, that getdataback program is able to see everything ont he disk...but is there a way to repair it...because I do not have a drive large enough to copy 200gb of data to.

 

[Brona]

Hello,

Active@ Partition Recovery tool is th soft that might be able to help you. It works great and helped me before. You should really give it a try!
http://www.partition-recovery.com/

 

[birdpup]

1. Go into Device Manager and update the drivers for the hard drive. This may include reinstalling the motherboard chipset drivers.
2. Try reinstalling the Maxtor Big Drive Enabler, since it seems as if the system is having difficulty properly recognizing the hard drive.
3. Use Maxtor's diagnostic utility, Maxblast 4 to test the drive and see if any errors result.
4. Try recovering the partition with Active@ Partition Recovery.
5. Try recovering the data with GetDataBack.

See this thread for more information:
Hard Drive, Partition, Data Recovery and Diagnostic Resources

 

[Jiggz]

This always happen with my external Maxtor. And the only way to fix it is to rebuilt the fat table and MBR. You can do this using disk utility programs like Partition Commander. Or the Recovery Console in the XP CD.

 

[CRXican]

Originally posted by: Jiggz
This always happen with my external Maxtor. And the only way to fix it is to rebuilt the fat table and MBR. You can do this using disk utility programs like Partition Commander. Or the Recovery Console in the XP CD.

I'm having the same issue. One of my freaking partitions is no longer what it used to be. It's a joke.

per this comment I tried to use the Windows recovery console

Iit asks for the Admin password which I never assigned and have no idea what to enter. What should I do?