Solved HDD disappeared during windows session, now freezes windows boot.

[Tomha]

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

 

[Northernsoul55]

Hi,

A few steps you may try:

1. Check in your Advanced Power Plan Settings to see if you may have the "Turn off hard disk after idle" option set to X amount of minutes. If so, change it to "Never"?

Hard Drive - :ar: Turn Off Hard Disk After Idle or Never

2. Check to see if there is an issue with the data and/or power cables connected to the HDD.
Try replacing them with different ones to see if the issue remains.

3. Try connecting the HDD to a different SATA port on the motherboard, as there
may be an issue with that particular port?

cheers

Dave

 

[Tomha]

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.

 

[Northernsoul55]

Hi,

Are you able to post up a screen shot of the Disk management window with the SSD plugged in?

Also have you checked in Device manager to see if the disk is present?

Cheers

Dave

 

[Tomha]

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.

 

[Northernsoul55]

Hi,

Ok...can you download: :ar: Seatools and see if the drive is recognised,
and if so perform a test to check health of drive.

If it is recognised with seatools, then try the drive in another computer.

Cheers

Dave

 

[Tomha]

I got home to day and forgot to check with seatools, but I plugged the drive into another computer and for some reason after a few minutes that computer ran CHKDSK, which is running now and saying all sectors scanned as of now are unreadable. What I get from this is that the whole disk has been corrupted...so..

-Is it possible to retrieve any data myself? Or would I need to fork out big bucks for professionals to do so?
-Is the disk bad, i.e. was it a hardware failure, or just a data corruption which I can format over?

CORRECTION:

It apparently scanned a specific corrupted sector, and found "448 bad file records", and is now "processing" them. Ill keep you updated.

 

[Tomha]

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

 

[Arc]

To recover the lost data, first try Recuva. It works very good.


Also you may go through the links :
Perform data recovery by Copying partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard.
How to perform lost partition recovery and deleted partition recovery under Windows? Partition Recovery Help.

To use Partition recovery wizard, the target partition must to be equal to or larger than the source partition, but it will recover all the data.

 

[Tomha]

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

 

[Arc]

Recuva will not recover any file that is corrupt (red indicators as per the video are corrupt ones).

If you want to go for the partition recovery wizard, better you do it on a removable disc, so that if the corrupt files come back by any chance, they will not hamper the system's performance anyhow.

 

[Tomha]

Alright, thanks for the help. I dont have any other hard drive as big as this one, so I'll try Recuva and see how things go.

Thanks ,
Tom

 

[Arc]

You are welcome Tom. Let us know how it worked

And, well done Dave

 

[Northernsoul55]

Thanks Arc for the invaluable input and guidance

Tom Glad to help, pity it wasnt better news, but it's good you know the solution.

cheers

Dave

 

[Tomha]

The light scan was able to detect a tonne of deleted files..one that was last modified in 1988 0.o, but none of my recordings, so I am doing a deep scan now.

Update:

Deep scan completed, no sign of the files. Ahwell...

 

[Tomha]

So I'm kinda reopening this. While moving some files around on the drive last night, it disappeared again. Fortunately, this time the drive reappeared after a restart. Because of this I have been running a few tests on the drive with Seatools, and it has failed the Drive Self Test, and the Long Generic Test. As far as I can tell this indicates a problem with the drive..and tells me I should probably ensure all the data is backed up and review my warranty Is this the case?

 

[Northernsoul55]

I would say the drive is failing from the test results, so back up your data

cheers

Dave

 

[Tomha]

Thanks again Dave , Ill contact my supplier and see about a replacement.

 

[Northernsoul55]

No problem, glad to help, Good luck