Hard Drive Lost...

Gornall · 18 Jan 2007 at 13:37

Hi,

I had a power cut bout 20minutes ago. Only lasted a couple of seconds but upon rebooting my SATA hard drive is no longer shown in windows.

Ive gone into disk management where it says its unallocated but if I try to initialise the drive it errors.

This is in the System Event log

The device 'WDC WD1600AAJS8550SA0 2' (IDE\DiskWDC_WD1600AAJS8550SA0__2________________05.06H05\5&a642691&0&0.0.0) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.

Any ideas?

rpstewart · 18 Jan 2007 at 14:08

Not nice. It's entirely possible that the power cut has damaged the drive - the heads rely on the platters spinning to prevent them from coming in contact. If the power goes the heads will return to the park position but if the platters spin down before they park they can crash, literally.

It's good news that the machine still reckons there's a drive there though so there is hope. Have you tried running scandisk on it (right click on the drive, pick properties, tools tab and pick error checking)?

Gornall · 18 Jan 2007 at 14:12

oh dear.

The drive wont initialize so there is no way of doing anything to it in windows.

It shows up in the bios and in disk management as Not Initialized and Unallocated.

Gornall · 18 Jan 2007 at 14:35

finally got it to recognise the disk.

I remembered overclockin the chip by 5mhz bout 20mins before the power cut.

Thought was worth a shot n now its recognised. Gonna have to format though.

Will post again with results

rpstewart · 18 Jan 2007 at 14:37

Gornall said:
The drive wont initialize so there is no way of doing anything to it in windows.

Hmm. Next thing to try then is the manufacturer's diagnostic program, there are links to them all in the sticky at the top of the forum.

EDIT: Have you tried a scandisk since you've got it recognised? That might recover the partition table.