A partition vanished

This morning I had a 360GB partition containing about 10 Macrium images. Tonight the partition had vanished and I was left with 360GB of free space. It is not a big loss because I always image also to 2 external drives that are disconnected when not in use.

But the matter puzzles me. I had not touched that partition all day long, never used disk management, have not really done any system work. All I did was a bit of internet work - mainly from one of my virtual Linux partitions (which cannot even access that partition) and some document work with Word. So nothing that would even come close to that partition.

First thought was some malware. But all scans came out clean. So what could have caused that??

It shows again how important imaging is - and to several disks, not only one. Of course one does not image the imaging partition, but making duplicates (or near duplicates) pays off in a case like this.

Hey Wolfgang,

That is odd. If you like, you might give the tutorial below a try to see if it may be able to recover the partition for the fun of it.

Partition - Recover Deleted Partitions in Windows

Thanks Shawn. I already made a new partition in the space and placed a new image into it. I figured it was not worth losing any sleep over it since I have plenty of images on the other disks. But the matter is bizarre. I posted it only as a warning for those members that think they can get away without precautions. Better plan ahead.

Thqts why you should always backup, backup, backup.

Exactly. Wolfgang, you might scan the hard drive with a test utility from it's manufacturer to make sure it's healthy and not getting ready to bite the dust on you.

That's the only possibility I see why that could have happened. Although this system is quite new and there are other partitions on the disk that did not budge. But I'll check anyhow. It's a Western Digital HDD.

I ran the WD daignostics (quick test). It passed.
Tomorrow I will run the full test because it is too late now - takes appr. 2 hours.

That's some scary stuff Wolfgang. How was the full test? Just for the fun, try this to see what you get. It only reads SMART data, which isn't a great predictor of HDD failure.
Try this too, download this: CrystalDiskInfo - Software - Crystal Dew World and open the program and follow the steps in this snip.

Hi Gary, the full test passed too. I'll try your suggestion later but now I have to run to the airport to get my MIL - what a pita.