Help please! Loosing drives and partitions

[barend]

First my two DVD burners and blu ray burner were gone in Windows, then most of my hard drive partitions disappeared :shock:...
BIOS shows the burners OK.
Partition Manager shows only C, D and E, and the rest as Unallocated (540Gb)....
Burners do show up in device manager but with exclamation marks "no driver".
What on earth may have happened?
No virus warning from Avast...

 

[FliGi7]

How did this come about?

 

[Kirsch]

How did this come about?

I think thats why the OP is posting

 

[FliGi7]

This is true.

However, he denotes a series of events, and a timeline (is this over a couple seconds or days or restarts or months...) will certainly help us.

 

[barend]

Very simply put:
- after startup this morning wanted to burn a data disk
- optical drives all three of 'em gone (ex m, n, o)
- exclamation mark in device mgr
- deleted in device mgr
- rebooted & checked BIOS: all present
- back in Windows 7 Ultimate partitions f, g, h, i, j, k and l gone
- and still exclamation marks
- started Partition Mgr: space now shown as unallocated

Hoping for some meaningful replies...

Hopefully I can get some data back from a backup, but how do I reinstall the opticals?

 

[FliGi7]

Hm, what motherboard are you running? Have you tried reinstalling your chipset drivers?

 

[Wishmaster]

How many physical Hard Drives do you have?

When it drop these partitons, where exactly are the partitions located.

Meaning, if it is dropping say partition D and E for example, are those partitions on the SAME physical disk or different physical disks.

Is it random or always the same ones?

 

[MacGyvr]

ALWAYS in a case like this, you should use System Restore to go back in time to a point before the problem happened. If that doesn't help, THEN move on to other options.

 

[Wishmaster]

ALWAYS in a case like this, you should use System Restore to go back in time to a point before the problem happened. If that doesn't help, THEN move on to other options.

Good point. Easier to rule out if hardware issue or Software/Drivers.

 

[barend]

Hm, what motherboard are you running? Have you tried reinstalling your chipset drivers?

Thanks!
Asus P5Q3-Deluxe-Wifi
If you say so, although the reason eludes me, I could try that, but isn't that something that's being installed automatically under W7?
The only worrying thing I see in the device mgr are these damn three "!" marks...
I managed to get my data back from my external HD and filled it into newly made partitions.
So getting my opticals to work is the main concern now...
I tried installing W7 just to have a peek (after first making an image of c:/) and sure enough they were found and installed correctly.
For several reasons I don't really want to do that, I'd have to spend days reinstalling my software, reinstalling my mixed network and last but not least reactivating Windows 7 Ultimate...:shock:

 

[barend]

Hm, what motherboard are you running? Have you tried reinstalling your chipset drivers?

Thanks!
Asus P5Q3-Deluxe-Wifi
If you say so, although the reason eludes me, I could try that, but isn't that something that's being installed automatically under W7?
The only worrying thing I see in the device mgr are these damn three "!" marks...
I managed to get my data back from my external HD and filled it into newly made partitions.
So getting my opticals to work is the main concern now...
I tried installing W7 just to have a peek (after first making an image of c:/) and sure enough they were found and installed correctly.
For several reasons I don't really want to do a clean W7 install, I'd have to spend days reinstalling my software, reinstalling my mixed network and last but not least reactivating Windows 7 Ultimate...:shock:
Isn't there some repair mode ? The W7 Emergency Boot (by MS) I once made did not seem to show such an option.

 

[Tews]

You can try doing a repair install ... This will show you how to do a repair upgrade install to fix your currently installed Windows 7 and preserve your user accounts, data, programs, and system drivers.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3413-repair-install.html?ltr=R

 

[barend]

How many physical Hard Drives do you have?

When it drop these partitons, where exactly are the partitions located.

Meaning, if it is dropping say partition D and E for example, are those partitions on the SAME physical disk or different physical disks.

Is it random or always the same ones?

Thanks!
They're on the same physical disc, there's only one plus a WD Sata-E external HD where I do my backups.
Unfortunately that's not accessible nor found by the Acronis emergency DVD at the PC's startup, although it's correctly shown in the bios.
Only Windows detects it.
No, it just happened yesterday: instead of these lost partitions there was now a contiguous unallocated space of 510 Gb.
I put that right by Partition Manager.
Beats me why cde were still there...

 

[barend]

You can try doing a repair install ... This will show you how to do a repair upgrade install to fix your currently installed Windows 7 and preserve your user accounts, data, programs, and system drivers.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3413-repair-install.html?ltr=R

Thanks,
I have an OEM version, it was a nightmare when I activated.
I would still prefer a simpler way to get my players back...

 

[barend]

ALWAYS in a case like this, you should use System Restore to go back in time to a point before the problem happened. If that doesn't help, THEN move on to other options.

I have that switched off to save on hdd space...
You're right, not a good idea...

 

[Tews]

There may not be a simpler solution, but good luck...

 

[barend]

You can try doing a repair install ... This will show you how to do a repair upgrade install to fix your currently installed Windows 7 and preserve your user accounts, data, programs, and system drivers.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3413-repair-install.html?ltr=R

This won't work, because there's no active DVD drive...

 

[live]

To back-up your data and have another look at your system

www.partedmagic.com

 

[barend]

Thanks to tews for hinting at the setup.exe on the W7 disc (did not realize this option survived from XP times ).
Problem was my optical drives were gone, so I had to use the very slow drive in my laptop over LAN, which took hours to complete, but now I have my drives back and all my data!