Hard drive vanished in XP

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9 Nov 2003
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nr Stoke
My current setup involves 2 Maxtor DiamondMax 250gb drives and XP sp2. One has windows on it plus a couple of other programs and the other has everything else.

I noticed my computer was running quite a bit slower then usual this morning so decided to run a defrag on my drives. I decided to do it on the one that has most of my files on it first. For the first few times it came up a with a couple of error messages stating it couldn't defrag the drive at that time. Eventually it started but was taking an absolute age so I stopped it, which again resulted in an error. Set up a disk check and restarted the computer.

Upon rebooting it showed the windows xp splash screen and then all went black when I was expecting the disk check screen. Stayed like this for about 10mins with some hard disk activity before I reset. On bootup into windows my hard disk had disappeared from MY Computer. It can be seen in the bios and even under device manager where it states it is working perfectly but I can't view it.

As already stated almost everything is installed on this hard disk and I know there must be a way of retrieving some of my important files. Any ideas?
 
There are some tools you can use to retrieve your data but how much data you can retrieve is dependant on how badly the drive is screwed.

Can the drive be picked up in the bios - if yes i suggest running a diagnostic tool which you can get off maxtors website. I know from perosanal experience that maxtor drives make good paper wieghts. I have lost 7 drives in the last 2 years all of which were maxtors

If you can get it back or not its always advisable to have an external backup drive. for a 250 Gb drive with a external housing its less than £100 which is not a lot in this day and age. I learnt that the hardway too so i feel for you on this one!
 
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