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Is my hard drive dead?

O

octopus41092

Golden Member
So, here's the deal. My secondary hard drive stopped working but not completely. Recently it was working fine, no hardware changes or anything but one day my computer suddenly recognizes it as an unformatted drive. The last time this happened I rebooted and everything went back to normal so I thought nothing of it.

Now the same thing happened and I'm trying to get it to detect the data on it again but it's no use. It still thinks that it's an unformatted drive. I previously formatted this drive in XP but then upgraded to Vista 64-bit which I'm currently using. I don't think that matters as it's still NTFS though.

Basically, does anyone know what might have caused this, is this just the hard drive dying? Also, are there any ways to fix this? Any diagnostic programs to check my hard drive with?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
 
Does the info of the drive show up correctly? Correct model and size in Windows and/or bios? If not, it's probably a bad cable (had it happen to me once).
I thought Vista had a diagnostic program.
 
Info and drive show up no problem. In the BIOS the model and size is also correct. I was able to use a program called GetBackData to search through it and copy the data back. I think I got everything back without any problems. But now I'm wondering if I should format it and put the data back onto it since it might just break again. I think the problem was a damaged filesystem though. So... would you recommend putting my stuff back on or just buy a new one.
 
Usually the manufacturer of your hdd has some tools to download to check your hard drive out. How old is the drive? Either is possible, but id say if its working now it was probably some issue with the file system.
 
I ran it with HDTune to check and it passed without any errors. I think the file system was damaged though. Is that just corruption from a power outage or something or could it be the actual drive is dying. I don't want to put my data back on it and end up having it break on me again.
 
The drive may have firmware issues at the hardware level, so any software fix attempt are likely unsuccessful.
 
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