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second HD not showing up in Windows 7 anymore, help!

S

scsi stud

Senior member
I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate x64, and I have two hard drives:

WD VelociRaptor 300GB (primary)
WD Raptor 150GB (secondary)

They have been working perfectly for over a year now, however, just today I noticed that the secondary HD was making weird subtle clicking noises when I was just using the PC normally.. as if it's going bad. I decided to further investigate, so I went to My Computer, and tried right-clicking (Properties -> Disk Check) on the secondary HD to do a chkdsk. It wasn't responding, and then Windows came up with a message, saying "Drive is currently in use..." etc etc, and that I have to dismount the drive in order to run a Disk Check. I clicked 'Dismount', then reboot as I also was going to run a chkdsk on the primary drive.

Long story short, I restarted the PC, it ran a chkdsk on the primary drive, but when Windows 7 booted back up, my seconday HD is no longer being shown. I went to Computer Management -> Disk Management, and I don't even see the drive there at all to re-mount.

I went to Device Manager, and I only see my primary drive. I shut off the computer and turned it back on, and my BIOS detects the secondary HD, yet still Win7 doesn't see it.

What can I do to fix this? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
 
If the drive has info you want or need, I suggest trying it in a USB external enclosure. If it works image the drive before it's gone for good.

Unplugging the drive, cycling the PC, and plugging it back in could also work.
 
An update:

I ran WD's disk diagnostic tool, and indeed there is a pretty bad error:

"Electrical element failure", error status code 0005

I unplugged the drive, and tried plugging it in a week later. Still the same thing -- the drive is making strange clicking noises, and I think it's gone kaput.

I think at this point, my only option is to warranty the drive, but I have so much data on there I need to recover. I went on WD's website to get a list of their 'recovery' partners -- does anyone recommend a good company that can do data recovery on failed drives?

Or better yet, since Windows can see the drive but the BIOS can, is there a low-level recovery software I can use?

Thanks in advance.
 
Last edited:
As long as you didn't write anything further to the drive then chances are good for recovery. Use Testdisk for Windows. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk. Use it to search for your partition. Once it finds it you can rebuild the partition table, allowing Windows to read it. Or I recommend using Testdisk to just read your files and copy it.

I recently had a USB drive that refused to write. The file system was intact but Windows couldn't read it. Testdisk was able to find the partition, since the USB refused to write anymore, it couldn't rebuild the partition table. Luckily, it still could read the file system and I was able to extract my files exactly.

The other tool Testdisk comes with photorec. It is similar to Recuva, in that if your partition and file system information is completely gone or unreadable you can still scour the disk to look for files based on file signature and structure. This is less accurate, but at least you'll recover something.

These tools are all free. Testdisk is extremely powerful and lots of other companies like Knoll OnTrack charge quite a bit for it's capability. The downside is it's DOS menu based and not a GUI. Luckily the site has tutorials.
 
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