So, my hard drive just decided to unallocate itself.

[godfire]

Ok, so this is kind of a major problem for me. Everything was going fine until I tried to access a directory on my E drive. It said something about it being corrupt or unreadable. I get this for some other ones on that drive too, but for the most part everything is fine. I figure it's just something weird so I restart.

Then my hard drive disappears.

To my growing alarm, I discovered through PartitionMagic that my drive was still there - but instead of NTFS, it was all unallocated. It showed that there were 3 unallocated spaces on the drive - 2 of them appeared to be what my previous "used" and "unused" numbers were, and the third one was just like 7 megs.

WHAT caused this? The only thing VAGUELY weird I did with it today was download 35 gigs from my roommate (so he could format). I don't understand why my drive would just do this? Is there ANY way I can fix this? I had about 130 gigs of data on there.

Thanks for any help...

Edit: It's a WD 200 GB drive running as a slave on Windows XP Pro. It's been fine for a few weeks until today.

 

[godfire]

Somebody? I'm getting kind of desperate here.

 

[SocrPlyr]

a similar thing happened to me... i'm not sure why but i didn't do a dynamic disk after that (was my only dynamic disk ever) I had the drive formatted w/ NTFS and i found a copy of R-Studio NTFS that was able to recover all my data... if you can get it you will need another drive to copy the data to temporarily and then you can format and bring it back to the drive... that is what i did anyways...

Josh

 

[godfire]

What exactly is the software you used? R-Studio or something?

Someone also told me that maybe the data just isn't being recognized, like a corrupted MBR? What exactly does that mean and how do I fix it?

Thanks...

 

[SocrPlyr]

ok to use something like R-Studio you need to put the drive in a working computer... then you can install the program to the working drive and then you can scan the other drive for files (this will take a while, hour or so...) then once it is done you can pick files that you can copy to another location, it takes a little bit of setup and playing around but it isn't that difficult, i don't have the program anymore so i can't be of much help in the exact logistics, sorry...

Josh