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Missing Drive 0 in some utilities suggests PC may fail to reboot
My Win7 PC has been running reliably for 9 years now and, despite the problem I'm reporting below, remains functioning apparently perfectly even now.
A few days ago I suddenly noticed strange symptoms that made me think the machine might not reboot if I shut it down, so I'm running it 24/7 while hunting for a solution...
The PC has a single internal Western Digital 1TB HDD "Disk 0" with two equal partitions:
"C: (Local Disk)" carrying the OS and program data, etc.
"K: (Volume on C:)" carrying user data.
In addition the PC has a permanently-connected external Samsung 1TB USB3.0 HDD "Disk 1" also with two equal partitions:
"M: (Ext. HDD)" carrying incremental system backups and system image
"N: (Volume on M:)" carrying local user data backups (that are also backed up remotely)
The strange symptoms are as follows:
- Under DISKPART on the command line, list disk shows no Disk 0 at all and instead begins with Disk 1 (the external disk) and list volume shows Disks M: and N: with their capacities, etc. but no C: or K:
- Administrative Tools > Computer Management > System Tools > Device Manager > PC > Disk Drives, shows the Western Digital HDD with its correct model number, but when called for, the error message "Volume information for this disk cannot be found" appears.
- Under Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management, Disk 0 is missing entirely, but Disks M: and N: are shown.
However, the following seem to indicate that all is well:
- In Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Administrative Tools, the contents of the computer are listed in the left pane. Here, just as is also the case in Windows Explorer, drives C: and K: can be seen together with all the files they contain. On K: all user data files can be read, written-to and deleted at will.
- Entering chkdsk c: onto the command line results in the message that Windows finds no errors, ending with a (positive) summary of the drive attributes.
- After having installed the program MiniTool Partition Wizard Free, this shows all disks and all partitions to be present and correct (including the System Reserved area with the status Active, C: with the status Boot and K:Vol. on C:). There is one possibly minor hiccup here: Drive C: is labelled "Disk 1" rather than "Disk 0" but I have no idea if that's what this program always does.
I have screenshots of all the above if required.
My question is what should I check or do before giving in and shutting the PC down and restarting it in the hope that it will boot cleanly?