"Disk is not Formatted" - Hard Drive Wiped - Help!

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Needs Help

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Just tonight I was sitting at the computer when Windows started that automatic update. It was downloading the updates when all of a sudden my hard drive started grinding away for about 20 minutes. I restarted a couple of times trying to find out what was going on. Now when I go into "My Computer" it says that my D drive isn't formatted!

Is there something going around or anything that could have caused this? The only thing I personally did tonight was try to create a network between that computer and the one I'm using now. At the exact same time the Windows Update started coincidentally.

I can live with losing that drive if I have to (I'd rather not have to), but I absolutely must save the stuff on my E drive. "E" seems ok but I'm afraid to turn the computer back on and try to back up the files for fear of the same thing happening to it. I'm also afraid to run "System Restore".

I know I'll get 15 responses saying that I'm stupid for not backing it up but these are special circumstances. I was in the process of doing exactly that. Please help if you can.

The message I'm getting is: "The disk in drive D is not formatted. Would you like to format it now?"
 
Thanks for the reply. By "noises" I just mean the usual sound that hard drives always make. Nothing weird, loud or unusual.
 
I doubt if your problem will affect a separate physical E drive - so If E is a separate physical drive and you really are that worried - open up the case and unplug the power lead to drive E before switching on. Fix all your problems - switch off & plug E back in.
 
I doubt if your problem will affect a separate physical E drive - so If E is a separate physical drive and you really are that worried - open up the case and unplug the power lead to drive E before switching on. Fix all your problems - switch off & plug E back in.
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Thanks. I should have mentioned that it's just one hard drive that's partitioned into three parts... C: Windows - D:Games - E: Family pics etc. The D drive is the one I lost and I can live with that if I have to. But this stupid thing is acting so weird I'm afraid to turn it back on and try to back up the E drive. I did it once and E seemed ok, then I shut it down and came here for help.
 
You have got to try something - there is no magical solution: By weird - do you suspect that you may have a beastie lurking? Try booting in safe made. (Press F8) Run your anti-virus / anti-spyware. Re-boot in normal mode & start recovery.
 
Ah, hehe, I see. I'm sorry, I actually caught that but had to run before I could edit my post :o

Have you run windows scan disk or anything similar on it? Or tried it in another computer? I doubt that'd do anything, but it's nice to eliminate problems with your machine.

Oh yes, and under computer management(Right click my computer, MANAGE > disk management) Does it show any partitions on the drive?
 
Oh yes, and under computer management(Right click my computer, MANAGE > disk management) Does it show any partitions on the drive?
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I did that and it says for drive D... "Partition, Basic, Healthy", but then it says that it's 100% free.

Luckily I was able to get everything off of my E drive after a 2:00AM run to Wal-Mart for some discs. Thanks so much for the help. I'm not computer saavy.:o

Then I ran WinDLG and I get the message "Too many bad sectors". So does this mean the hard drive is shot? If so that sucks because it was only about 6 months old. Is it odd that the other two partitions are still working?
 
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Ok... I guess I have to buy a new hard drive. This one was a Maxtor with IDE bus and Ultra DMA. I need to know what is compatable. I keep seeing Ultra ATA stuff out there but I'm a newb and dont know if it will work. I can install it myself though.
Maybe you can reccomend something compatable that is good for online gaming. I play a lot of Battlefield II.
 
For the most part a hard drive is a hard drive, with the exception of Raptors (which I think are a waste of money) they aren't really good or bad for gaming. Even with a raptor, you're really only looking at loading speed benefites.

Any of these drives are compatible: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2010150014+1035907789&Submit=ENE&SubCategory=14 Without knowing what motherboard you have, I don't know if you can use an SATA drive so I just got a list of ATA100 drives (although you can use ATA133 as well).
 
I've had that happen before with a Samsung. It was dead. Nothing could be done with it. See what you can do but don't keep your hopes up.
 
I've had that happen before with a Samsung. It was dead. Nothing could be done with it. See what you can do but don't keep your hopes up.
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LOL, I can honestly say that's the first time I've heard that advice... "...don't keep your hopes up". Thanks for the input though. I'm going to go get a new one now. I'd order from Newegg but I can't wait that long. Thanks everyone for all your help. I'm glad to see a forum with people willing to help newbs.:)
 
Hard Drive Cured?

Thanks for the help. I couldn't do this without it.
This is weird. I already went and bought a new hard drive and came back home. I decided to try to format the old hard drive to wipe any info that might be on there before sending it in for warranty. I formatted the "broken" D drive first and now it is recognized, seemingly with no problems. So what's this about? Is it going to do this again? How did my D drive magically unformat itself? :?
 
I installed my new hard drive because the old one, although working now, lost my trust. I'm now partitioning the new hard drive into three sections and I'm formatting one right now. It's asking if I want to "enable compression". Should I do this? Why or why not? Sorry for all the newb questions.:o
 
Needs Help said:
I installed my new hard drive because the old one, although working now, lost my trust. I'm now partitioning the new hard drive into three sections and I'm formatting one right now. It's asking if I want to "enable compression". Should I do this? Why or why not? Sorry for all the newb questions.:o
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Dont enable compression, you dont want to unless you are only storing like a million pictures. It will not install games and whatnot that way.
 
Thanks for all your help guys. I sucked it up and bought a new one. I ran the WD Diag again like aaronrkelly suggested and it said there were too many bad sectors even though it seemed to be working fine and was showing full capacity.

I bought a new Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB, 7200, 8MB cache. I hope I did ok as there weren't many choices in EIDE. I'm going to play a lot of online games.

I still wonder what happened though. It was strange how only the one partition went out. I was backing up the files from my other PC onto this one. We're talking about 20+GB transfering over through the network, it took hours. Everything made it over and seemed fine. Luckily I moved all the family pictures and such over to the E partition. Then I started reinstalling Windows on the other PC so that wiped everything over there. This was the first time I was stuck without having everything backed up.The next day it was saying the my D partition wasn't formatted. I lost everything in there. I wonder if transferring all those files over for al those hours burnt up that partition? I don't even know if that's possible.
 
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