I was using my pc when it crashed and restarted itself. Once it logged back on my 3rd hard drive (samsung 400gig connected via secondary slave) was gone. My bios dosnt even detect it. I've tried using windows updates and also ran both a spyware and virus killer on it and still dosnt appear. I also tried running system restore but it said "changes made to the drive(s) E:\ after this point cannot be reversed because the drive was either excluded from system restore monitoring, or was turned off or removed" So i decided against it. I'm running out of ideas. any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Cheers
have you tried manually installing it from the control panel "add hardware" feature? Or tried any programs that may locate it like Partition Magic? Possibly even take it out, turn on the PC then shut back down and install it to see if it will get recognized.
Hi thanks for your reply. I replaced the ide cable and the drive is now visible in my bios and in the my computer section. Although now I've ran into a different problem. The drive is misreporting its size in my bios. its a 400 gig drive and it's reporting it as 36gig. It also asks me to format the drive everytime i try to access it. I have a few hundred gig worth of data on there that now seems to be either corrupted or gone. is there anything i can use to fix the partition or recover my data or both? Cheers
i havnt checked recently but partition magic may have some of those features, you should check it out.
once you get it back, you really should invest in another huge hard drive to back all your data up to. that way, you won't be risking so much next time something goes wrong.
yea i got a OEM 500gb HDD off newegg for about 130bucks + a external HDD encloser for like 30bucks and it backs up all my most important things, well worth the money imo
i would also say Partition Magic is your best hope. That is unless the whole drive has gone corrupt. IN a case like that you may have to format the whole things and lose the information. There are also programs out there designed for hard drive recovery that may work.
Thanks again for your help guys i got it fixed. I got my mate to come over and see what he could do cause i was all out of ideas. he connected it as a slave but didnt realize he connected it in 36gig capacity mode. I pulled out my drive and noticed it was connected wrong and corrected it. put it back in turned on the pc and works perfectly again. thanks heaps cheers
