Hard drive help urgently wanted

ChrisLandin · 5 May 2022 at 14:43

Hi guys.

I have a 4tb hdd that up until 2 days ago was working fine. Then all of a sudden the pc cant read the drive. No errors popped up on screen in sentinel etc.

When you go into disk management it says the disk can not be initialized due to an i/o error.

Can this be fixed? Im hoping so as this drive had numerous family videos and pictures of my kids growing up.

Thanks in advance

Quartz · 5 May 2022 at 15:29

Buy a new drive and restore your data from your backup

ChrisLandin · 5 May 2022 at 16:52

Quartz said:
Buy a new drive and restore your data from your backup

Is that the technical answer to its had it??

Quartz · 5 May 2022 at 17:12

It could be something very simple like a cable needing reseating. Don't forget to check both ends.

Sparx · 5 May 2022 at 18:30

Had this years ago and it ended up being the SATA cable, somehow went dodgy. Probably lucky fix though, could be something else or it may have died!

ChrisLandin · 7 May 2022 at 12:17

Drive has died unfortunately. Ive tried multiple data cables, different sata ports on the motherboard and all have drawn a blank. Going to have to buy a new drive and backup my data. Thankfully I have it all backed up. Was hoping that there may have been a simple fix I was missing.

Thanks for the help guys

Snapshot · 8 May 2022 at 07:10

If there are no nasty noises it could be the controller. In which case swapping it for the controller from a similar drive might work. But as you have a backup just buying a replacement drive is the sensible option.

m4rmite · 8 May 2022 at 07:34

Try a Ubuntu live cd, sometimes it will read from a drive that Windows won't.
I've had it happen to me in the past.

Then Copy your data and buy a new drive.

Semple · 8 May 2022 at 08:03

ChrisLandin said:
Drive has died unfortunately. Ive tried multiple data cables, different sata ports on the motherboard and all have drawn a blank. Going to have to buy a new drive and backup my data. Thankfully I have it all backed up. Was hoping that there may have been a simple fix I was missing.

Thanks for the help guys

Kudos to you for having a backup. A lot of the time people on here posting to ask a similar question to recover their precious data do not have a backup.