Hard drive says "not formatted" but it passes all drive tests

[hjo3]

I have a Hitachi 160 GB HD which suddenly stopped working properly a few days ago. I went to open the drive in Explorer and a window popped up with the message "The disk in drive G: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?" I downloaded Hitachi's drive diagnostics tool and ran all the tests and everything came back clean. Even in Disk Management (I use Win 2K Pro SP4), the drive size reads correctly and Windows says it's "healthy." But it shows 100% free space and no file system (it had about 90 GB of data on it and was formatted with NTFS). I did the registry patch for >137GB HDs a long time ago, so that doesn't have anything to do with it. Suggestions?

Planning to plug it into another system to rule out my own motherboard, but I'm lazy and there're like 2 screws on the case panel and 4 in the drive... agh, too much work. (Well, not really, but I'm great at procrastinating.) Anything else I can do with the drive in the machine? What's the likely cause of the problem?

 

[hjo3]

Anyone?

 

[jackschmittusa]

Sounds like a damaged MBR. Is there a backup MBR on your drive (I would think the Hatachi utility could tell you if there was one)? If so, you could try restoring from the backup. I did that last on a Maxtor.

 

[hjo3]

Originally posted by: jackschmittusa
Sounds like a damaged MBR. Is there a backup MBR on your drive (I would think the Hatachi utility could tell you if there was one)? If so, you could try restoring from the backup. I did that last on a Maxtor.

Ugh, I don't think I have a backup; there was nothing in the utility for repairing the MBR, IIRC. Do you think the fixmbr command (from the Win CD recovery console) would fix it? Or could it possibly make it worse (i.e. impossible to retrieve data at all)?

 

[jackschmittusa]

Don't know if it will fix it, but I don't see how it will make it any worse as it does not erase data on the drive. You may have to buy a data recovery app (like Spinrite) to get the data back anyway.

 

[hjo3]

Originally posted by: jackschmittusa
Don't know if it will fix it, but I don't see how it will make it any worse as it does not erase data on the drive. You may have to buy a data recovery app (like Spinrite) to get the data back anyway.

Oh right, doh, I was confusing the MBR with the FAT.

I'll look into data recovery apps. Hopefully Hitachi will respond to my tech support request someday. Thanks

 

[Jeff7]

Get the demo version of R-studio and see if it can see anything on the drive. If you want more than 64KB of data back though, you'll have to buy it; that's the demo version's only restriction.

 

[hjo3]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
Get the demo version of R-studio and see if it can see anything on the drive. If you want more than 64KB of data back though, you'll have to buy it; that's the demo version's only restriction.

Ah, thanks. I exchanged email with Hitachi and they basically said I should try data recovery apps too. Thanks all.