New
#1
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...?