System Reserved created on a secondary drive

[ryuwrx]

Good evening posters.

I'm a new member and I'm completely lost on how to fix a recent problem. My windows backup typically runs on Thursdays and last night it finished in a much shorter time than I usually expect it to. I don't know if this is related to my current problem.

When I started my PC after coming home from work today (Friday) my computer didn't recognize my F: drive. I have three 1TB drives, C: contains my OS and is my boot drive, E: is the drive Windows does backups to, and F: contained all my personal files/folders.

After opening the disk manager the HDD that was my F: drive is now showing as a "System Reserved" drive with no drive letter. I'm given it the former drive letter of F: and I only see 100mb of the 1tb drive with no files/folders.

My multi-part question is as follows:
How did Windows create this System Reserved on my F: drive when it was only a storage drive?
How do I get rid of the System Reserved partition without losing all my files/folders that should be on that HDD?

My research has returned lots of results on System Reserved partitions, but I haven't seen anything that covers my specific problem. I'm lost at this point and desperate to fix this without losing the data on that drive.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Ryan

 

[ryuwrx]

 

[AddRAM]

No way can the drive you use to call F be the system reserved partition, no way.

If your hard drive labeled F is not showing, then it died.

The system reserved partition will never get a letter unless you give it a letter.

Your other 1 TB drive does not even show up on your DM shot.

There is no reason to get rid of the SR partition.

Disc 0 is exactly how it should be and should be left alone, it shows the entire 1 TB drive.

 

[Britton30]

Your snip shows the 100MB System partition on the same drive as your OS, disk 0. AddRAM is correct, you are showing only two 1TB drives and a DVD.
Oh, welcome to Seven Forums.

 

[DocBrown]

You need to expand your screen snip of disk management to full screen. We cannot see the bottom portion of it that probably shows the HD you are talking about.

 

[AddRAM]

Unless it`s raw, it would be showing up top, and I`m sure the op would see that. ( I hope )

 

[ryuwrx]

Thanks for the help guys. I just did a restart and had the same thought AddRAM mentions. My DISK2 is showing on BIOS, but it's not showing in the disk manager. That's a relief in ways, but now I need to find out why it's not showing.

And thanks for the welcome.

 

[ryuwrx]

My drives are hot swappable, after the restart I had removed them to confirm my suspicions. I'm going to try another restart and put that drive on a different SATA port to see if it's the port or the drive.

 

[ryuwrx]

Well, it's not a SATA problem. Any suggestions on how to recover a crashed HDD?

Thanks so much for the feedback guys. I was seriously stressing out about losing 12 years of data, which is still the problem, but at least I know the issue now and I can move forward.

 

[AddRAM]

Is the hard drive working ? It`s tough to recover data if the drive does not even show up.

 

[ryuwrx]

It's showing up in the BIOS, but it's not showing in the Disk Management at all. I also noticed that Windows is slower on startup when it's connected than when it's not connected.

Other than that I can't tell if it's completely failed or even slightly working.

 

[DocBrown]

Do you have a spare different SATA data cable you can test with it ?

 

[ryuwrx]

I have a Corsair 850D case and I moved it to a different drive bay and it still wasn't recognized by W7, only the BIOS is recognizing it via a different SATA port. In this case it was moved from SATA2 to SATA4 on the MoBo via the Corsair's hot swap bays.

 

[DocBrown]

Some members have created a bootable Linux disc and then managed to salvage files off of a corrupted / dying HD, since it does show in the Bios.

 

[ryuwrx]

I'll do some research. Thanks for the info, Doc. Much appreciated.

 

[gregrocker]

Copy & Paste - in Windows Recovery Console
Paragon Rescue Kit Free Edition 11.0 Free CD

See if Partition Wizard Home Edition will detect the drive, as I've had to rescurrect drives by running Partition Wizard Check File System on the HD.

Then run Partition Wizard Partition surface test