Laptop's built in external hard drive suddenly disappears/unallocated.

Hello! Long story short, my external hard drive suddenly became unallocated. I've seen some youtube guides, posts on other forums, posts on sevenforums, but I can't figure it out -- the solutions for some of these forum posts don't work for me. And so I decided to make a new thread in the hope of solving it -- i've included details as specific as I can possibly remember.

Details:

I have a MSI laptop, windows 8.1 64 bit. Just today, while i was working my computer suddenly froze, and after a couple of minutes shut down. I couldn't boot up the computer as it kept going black screen, or the MSI logo booting screen (sometimes saying "Preparing automatic repair"). Then the computer went to install some sort of updates, and then crashed again. Eventually after numerous restarts/forced shutdowns the computer booted up fine -- except the external hard drive (built in the laptop) was missing. I discovered that the computer probably froze because a video recording software of mine was recording in the background and using up a enormous amount of disc space (40 gb video). After deleting the huge video file, the computer started working normally, but the external hard drive is still missing.

I've tried:
In administrative tools --> computer management --> disk management, it asks me to initialize the drive. I've read that this deletes the data, but I don't think the data on the drive is that important, although recovering it would definitely be better. However, when I try to initialize it, I get a error "Data error (cyclic redundancy check)."
Some software like Minitool's partition recovery wizard, which detects my unallocated drive. However, when I try to scan the drive, it scans at a absurdly slow rate (estimated scan time = 4 years), whereas my C:\ drive scans almost instantaneously. I next tried easeUS's recovery software, which also detects a unallocated drive. However, like Minitool, the scan is far too slow to be practical of use. I am sure the drive the software is scanning is the hard drive I am looking for because it has the same hard drive size as the hard drive that went missing.

How can I recover this drive? Is it possible to recover the data or parts of the data that came with it? If not, how do I simply just "get" the drive back -- as in, be able to use the drive again, with or without recovering the former data.

Please let me know if you have any tips, insights, suggestions, solutions, etc. Thanks for reading, answering hopefully! Your help is much appreciated. :)



P.S. one thing I must note is that although the laptop is new, for the past few months I've been having this issue where the computer seems to have some sort of loose power connector inside. Meaning, it would shut down abruptly if jolted even gently, and sometimes required me to tilt the computer in certain ways in order to turn the computer on. Not sure if this has anything to do with my hard drive issue...?

Welcome to Seven Forums.

1. I should first of all admit I do not understand what you mean by "an external Hard drive, built-into the laptop". An external HDD is one which is totally external to the PC and which we plug into the PC through the USB port.

Do you mean a second HDD inside your laptop apart from the system drive?

Please mention the exact model Number of your laptop.( So that I can check whether your laptop has two internal drives. I Know some do have.)

2. With such loose power connection inside your laptop, you are not going to get anywhere resolving the problems in the HDD. Since you say it is a new laptop, it should be under warranty and you should immediately get the problem rectified by MSI.

So please get it done first.

Thanks for replying!

Its the MSI GS60 Ghost laptop. And yes you are correct, I was referring to a second hard drive inside the computer. It acts just like a external hard drive you connect by usb, except it's... well always there, "inside" the laptop.

My warranty lasts for another 4 months, and I'm currently in university studies and exams at the moment. I cannot have it fixed/RMAed until after exams (about 2 weeks from now). During the break following exams, I plan on sending it to a MSI factory to get it replaced/fixed. However, doing so erases all of the data I believe. Is there any way I could recover the data? I don't remember putting anything very important on the drive, but it did store a lot of things, so I would imagine that some things in there would be really useful XD

I don't think the hard drive failure problem has anything to do with the problem. I think it was because of the video recording program using up all the space on my C:\ hard disk (i had 0 bytes free). This caused my computer to crash/lose power abruptly, which possibly caused the unallocation of the hard drive I have...? Maybe, I'm not sure, just pure speculation at the moment.