HDD disappeared during windows session, now freezes windows boot.

So I was using premiere pro, putting together a video, when all of a sudden windows becomes non-responsive. 20 seconds later windows recovers and tells me there was a video driver crash, and all my video sources disappear from my project. Premiere prompts me to locate the files, so I go looking for them, only to find the hard drive the files were located on has disappeared (No longer visible in disk management, explorer, etc).

My initial reaction was to restart windows...perhaps it was just..something..a restart would fix? . This didn't change anything, so I did a bit of googling. I was unable to find a potential reason, but several people had a similar problem of their hard drives disappearing, and it just took a couple of restarts to fix it. So I restarted again to see if that would solve the problem.

This lead to the situation I am currently in. Now, with the drive plugged in, the BIOS will recognize it, but when Windows starts up, it remains stuck on the black screen with the windows logo and the text "starting windows". Removing the drive solves this issue, and Windows starts fine...but my drive still doesn't work. There were no programs stored on the drive, no drivers..far as I can tell windows should have no reason to refer to information on that drive during start up, its all just stored files.

So....anyone know why? Did the drive die? Is there corrupted data on it? Is it possible to retrieve the data? Any input is appreciated.

Thanks,
Tom

Thanks for the suggestions. I have hard disk idle turned off by default as I am using an SSD, and I just swapped out a new SATA cable for the drive and changed it to another motherboard port. Still the same issue.

I have also tried plugging the hard drive in after windows has started, but this does nothing (still doesnt show up)

Furthermore, I tried doing a clean boot type think with the hard drive plugged in, but even the windows install disk gets stuck on the "starting windows" screen when I try and boot from that instead.

This is a screen shot of disk management with both the SSD and the problem drive plugged in. (when I refereed to the SSD before, I simply meant that because I have an SSD in the system, I don't have HDD sleeping enabled as it can (supposedly) interfere with binning. The problem drive is a 2Tb HDD).



As for device management, there is no sign of the drive anywhere.

Ok, so it appears the premiere pro corrupted the video file I was editing at the time, and therefore the whole sector that was stored in. The video was located in "X:/Recordings/Sorted and Named", and the whole X:/Recordings folder was deleted by DSKCHK. So that solves things..not in the most ideal way, a lot of the files there were relatively new and so I have no backups, but I get a lot of other data back, which saves me a lot of trouble.

I'll mark this as solved, but if by chance someone reads the following, are these deleted files gone for good (i.e. overwritten with "0"s, or can some of it be retrieved with the appropriate software?


Thanks for the help Northernsoul55,
Tom

Thanks for the suggestion, is there any risk of recovering corrupt files which would corrupt the whole section again?