Can't see secondary drive anymore

Hello,

My secondary drive started disappearing last month.
I could see it in Safe Mode or when I scanned for hardware with the rapid storage technology, it would pop up.

But after awhile, the Computer would freeze.
But wouldn't if the secondary drive wasn't visible.


But today, I couldn't do those two things anymore, as I couldn't see the drive anymore.


So I flashed my BIOS to a later version for better SATA compatibility. I read somewhere that that fixed the problem for someone experiencing the same thing.

That didn't do anything. In fact in rapid storage technology it would only list 1 empty port instead of 4 empty ports as it did before. You see I partitioned the secondary drive into 4 parts.

So i tried hooking up the secondary drive to a SATA to USB adapter.
I can see one partition, but the other partitions are empty ?

I'm ready to buy an external hard drive to back it up, I wish I would've done it sooner.

Is this disappearing secondary drive an internal?

What do you see in Windows Disk Management?

Post a screen shot of that.

If the drive had 4 partitions and 3 of the 4 are now empty, I assume you lost a bunch of personal data?

I'm not a drive recovery authority. Jumanji is the best member for that.

Partitions going to RAW status is definitely not a good sign.

I see that your H partition is nearly full. At a minimum, I would copy everything on that to some other drive immediately if I cared about whatever is on it.

Generally, I think the recommendation with lost partitions is to first try to recover the partitions rather than the data on them. The data is likely still there, but you can't get at it when the partition is lost.

The best outcome for you is that the other 3 partitions never had anything on them and were always empty. If that's the case, just copy what's on H to some other drive and then wipe out all partitions and start over.

But you may have more than a partition problem. The drive itself may be sick.

I'd first concentrate on trying to recover those 3 RAW partitions. I think Partition Wizard and testdisk (?) are 2 commonly used tools, but I'm not skilled enough to tell you what you need to do with them.

Yikes, thanks for the help thus far.

I definitely had data on all 4 partitions and each partition was almost full like the H drive.


How would I go about enlisting Jumanji's help?

I just found a recent post of his that said he is going to be in Spain on vacation till June 12.

You might have better luck by opening a new thread in the "backup and recovery" section with a title something like:

3 of 4 partitions gone to RAW status. How do I recover partitions or data?

You will probably be asked to do a preliminary scan with a tool, most likely Partition Wizard, a free download.

But anything is possible. Wait to hear what they say.

In the meantime, assume your drive is dying within 24 hours and get the data now on H copied elsewhere.

You should do that as a matter of course anyway---as drives and partitions can go bye-bye without notice.

As you have just found out.

right

MiniTool Power Data Recovery [which includes a partition recovery of sorts] may be a great bet! Immediately after copying off the data in partition H, then attempt recovery of the three RAW partitions. There are several free and pay-for utilities like MiniTool. :)