Er.... HELP!

[Energizer Bunny]

Having an infuriating problem with my hard drive.

I have 2 hard disks, one for Windows, the second for Steam and other games. I was doing a big of cable management earlier and to change something around had to pull the SATA cable out of the second hard disk. After a couple of seconds I put it back and then started the PC.

It started like normal, but now whenever I try to access the drive I get

"You need to format drive F before you can use it"

then

"The volume does not contain a recognised file system"

I know this often points to a corrupt partition but it seems suspect that the drive would just corrupt or break purely due to having the cable gently removed then re insterted.

Does anybody have any other ideas what this could be or how to resolve it? I've tried a swapping the cables between my primary and secondary drives with no luck.

Running Windows 7 Home Premium and the drive in question is 1.5 tb Samsung drive

 

[Energizer Bunny]

Hate to bump but... any ideas guys?

For some reason windows is only detecting the drive as 32gb as well. Weird.

 

[manveruppd]

I see you've tried plugging it to a different SATA port with a different cable btw - do you wanna swap round the power cables too just to be sure it's not that? If that doesn't work, try clearing your CMOS data - it has happened to me (once) that a drive that not only couldn't be accessed by Windows but coudln't even be detected by the computer at all worked fine after a CMOS clear (obviously a corrupted BIOS). Pretty unlikely to work for you but while you're in there swapping power cables you might as well give it a go!

If that doesn't work, then it's either a file system error, a boot sector error, or a physical defect. If it's a file system error, I suppose chkdsk won't be able to even scan it if Windows doesn't detect any formatted partitions on there... maybe boot into safe mode and try system restore?

If it's a boot sector error, as is most likely, it _might_ be repairable with the fixmbr command. I've never needed to use fixmbr myself so can't walk you through it. But even if it doesn't recover your data it'll probably make it accessible by Windows again. Actually I remember reading somewhere that they changed the name of the fixmbr command for 7, don't remember what to.

The bad news is that HDDs are pretty robust and error-tolerant these days, and in my experience any error so severe as to make the drive inaccessible it usually means it's borked. (Then again, I usually leave my computer on 24/7 and sitting 2m away from a pair of big hi-fi speakers so the frequency with which I go through hard drives might not be typical!) So even if you recover everything you might still want to bin it.

Do you have SMART enabled in your BIOS? If not, switch it on and check the health of the drive using a Windows utility that can read SMART data. Speedfan springs to mind. I think Everest does it too.