A drive I normally use for storage, a 640Bg WD Blue is no longer registering upon boot or if I turn off the power to the Nexstar CX3.5" external enclosure it is always housed in, remove the drive, reinsert, in and power on. Have powered everything off and on - no go. All was well last night until I took it out and installed another drive to do a Paragon BU 2011 free software (for the first time). That drive and the info within is a-ok. When I re inserted the WD blue thismorning it wouldnt show up. In Win732bit the drive is seen in Device Manager. I have it set to Policies/Quick Removal and tried to change it to Better Performance / Write Cache Policy (as a test) but it wont allow me to change that. In Glary Utilities the drive is not recognised.The DVD drive has a bunch of unrelated words n symbols where the drive info should be next to the drive letter. But after double clicking all the DVD info is there. Non the less, Scary stuff Can you help pls.
More news... In Win7 Ultimate/ Disk Management the drive indicates there is nothing on it, that there is 100% availalble. Booted from UBCD4win and to my relief, all the information can be seen with that program. So why does Win7 booted normally not recognise the drive n how to see it again. I need it for work Thx
Thx Cudni for the post Havent got another drive to dump it to now. It's nearly full with 550Gb used and the only other drive I have is 200 Gb. And which utilities to do test with. Thx
Forget an important bit. I had just defragged using MyDefrag 4.3.1 in the Consolidate Free Space mode before switching drives to do the Paragon BU. That has got to be the problem surely. In MyDefrag 4.3.1 Consolidate Free Space mode - "Moves files and directories to the beginning of the disk... beginning with files from the end of the disk." Do you know if this program has caused others problems.
Sounds like Windows is looking for something at the beginning of the WD drive and it's not there. I don't suppose there's any option feature to 'undo' what you did, but if not, you could always try defragging again, doing the same thing, and perhaps the files at the end get put back at the beginning where they belong. That's just a thought-- because there's always the possibility doing that would only muck things up even more. I'm not familiar with that particular defragging app. And of course, this all assumes you have some way of now accessing the drive to attempt anything to begin with.
Thats what i thought too...something like a header bit of info that has now been placed somewhere else on the drive. I did find my way to the MyDefrag forum and am eagerly awaiting word from there. I'll reprot back. Thx for replying.
I had something similar happen once where the drive was not recognized at all under disk management. The entire drive disappeared. Windows did not recognize the partition or drive any longer. I was able to use a data recovery app called filescavenger to locate the disk, and recover all the data to another external drive. It was a 2tb drive so it took about 5 hours to recover all the data.
Thx for that Cutting_Edgetech. I'll have a look at filescavenger. But as mentioned earlier, using UBCS4win cd boot all the information can be seen on the drive, so do you think I could do anything else other than a complete dump to another drive.