Seagate HDD stopped, no drive letter assigned

J

Johnny666

New Member
Hello all from Newbie :-)

I have been running a music computer for a number of years, upgraded a few years ago to 2 HDD's - 1 for the system and 1 for data.

A few days ago I installed a Bluray burner and all was well, however a couple of days ago I tried to boot the PC and it wouldn't. I eventually got it running but the data disc is no longer recognised in any Windows programs. It appears in BIOS and in 'Device Manager' where it says it's working correctly, but in nothing else. In Computer Management it reports the device as 'unreadable.'

I have, using Active File Recovery, as far as I know, copied ALL the data from the hard drive without any issue onto a seperate archive drive so I haven't lost anything apart from a couple of days of frustration. Active File Recovery reports the partition that contains all my data on the drive as being in 'Excellent' condition, and a small partition containing $LogFile, $MFT, $MFTMirr and $Volume as being 'Very Bad.'

A couple of questions: I'm not sure what has happened to the drive, everything has been working fine up until this point. Can somebody possibly explain to me what has caused this to happen? There are no viruses on the PC - it isn't even internet connected - it only runs Cubase and Sony Vegas. Can I do anything with it short term? I can't assign a drive letter to it so ChkDsk won't work, neither can I reformat it...

Secondly - out of interest, I scanned the system drive as well as a laptop I use for my day to day work. Both reported the same situations - data was 'Excellent' and a small partition containing the same files above were reported as being 'Very Bad.' Again, I have had no problems with any of the other drives. Is the software possibly mis-reporting? I don't understand why the above files should go bad any quicker than any other areas on the disc. Again, I have no malware or viruses that I am aware of and regularly scan with decent anti-malware software.

Can anyone help me, or is it a case of a new drive needed? Currently at great expense... :(

Thanks in advance - John
 
Hard drives can go out at any time. If the bios detects but windows doesn't, then you can try doing a disk diagnostic on it and see if its repairable. What brand of drive is it?
 
It's coming up as a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 SATA 500-GB Hard Drive.

I'm not sure how to perform a systems diagnostic on it, sorry. I tried ChkDsk via Recovery Console but the drive has no letter assigned to it and comes up as 'drive #?' so I can't run that. Device Manager says it's OK, but via Admin Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management it's coming up as unreadable, so I can't assign it a drive letter from there.

Can you suggest anything, please?
 
Thank you for that - I'm downloading it now via the laptop and should be able to burn the CD from there (assuming I can burn the ISO file - it's all new to me!)

Then I'll boot it in the desktop and see what happens...
 
As long as the burning software you have will write ISO images. What burning software do you have?
 
Nero - done that and booted with the CD :-)

It's scanned and picked up both hard drives, I assume I need 'Long Test' as opposed to 'Short Test?' I can't see an option for extended test.
 
Seriously, no apology needed! I'm just grateful for the help you are giving me :)

I assume this is going to take some time, although it's completed a heady 1% of the scan already...! :D
 
20% completed now.

Is there an on-going report as to the condition or is this presented at the end of the scan, do you know? Nothing showing up as untoward at the moment.
 
If any errors are detected you will see on the top part of the screen under the scanned LBA if I remember correctly.
 
Ah yes, I think I see where you mean - there's a 'Test Results' column next to the 'Test Progress' column with the LBA counter in it. Nothing yet @ 25%

Power On Hours = 3610... I never realised I used the PC that much :eek:
 
Now I can't even boot the PC, it doesn't appear to be recognising the C Drive. It's just asking for a CD/DVD to boot from... :(
 
Go into the bios and make sure hdd is set for first boot device or if you have access to the boot menu at startup then change it there temporarily. Did you change the boot order when you ran the diagnostic cd?
 
Check all connections, data and power. Do the drives spin up when you turn the system on? Are they IDE or SATA drives?
 
I'm now getting Disk Boot Failure, although when I pressed 'TAB' on the splash screen I think I recognised one of the drives being listed, but I think that was the Seagate data drive, not the system drive.

Both drives are SATA drives. Unfortunately it's 2:30am here and the PC is located in a cabinet from which I need to disconnect it and drag it out, takes me about 15 minutes to disconnect, make changes and reconnect. I don't think my better half would appreciate the noise ;)

I did recall when I had this same error message earlier in the week it would boot up with the Windoze disk inserted, maybe worth trying?
 
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