hard drive corruption

[scorpioangel]

has anyone come across a situation where a hard drice stops working and when attempting to check it in DOS it is seen as a removable media (floppy or cd) drive?
This bizarre occurence has just happened with my secondary hd without any warning. Windows can see the drive and lists it as hd but with no info re size. and is not able to access it at all.
If anyone has seen this type of thing before any help to get back my 10,000 music files would be appreciated.

[vehelpfulguy]

Well if the drive is formatted NTFS and you are checking it with "real" DOS then I dont think DOS will know what an NTFS drive is so may report it wrongly.

If you are using XP (or I guess Vista) you can go into the Windows control panel then "Administrative Tools" then "Computer Management" then "Disk Management" and see what that says.

For my drives they all say "healthy"

[ACtheTROLL]

oh dear ... I think you may just get (and rightfully so!!!!) a bit of a doing from VHG for not backing up the drive!!!!

it's difficult to say for definite .... I assume you've done the cable connections
let's take it in sequence

you don't say which file system you are using

if you are using XP or Vista it's quite probably NTFS

we need a few accurate terms here

if by dos you mean a dos (w98) bootdisc or similar - you won't be able to see NTFS partitions

if you mean the command prompt (from within XP/Vista) mmmmmm you could be in trouble.

it could be as easy as using an undelete prog
or
you could try booting your PC from a Knoppix CD and see if that can recover the partition
or
(my favourite) use
Acronis disc director suite

the problem with recovery is it's iffy if you don't have the tools to hand and (generally) you only get one chance.

but come back with a little more info

[scorpioangel]

Ok so I was being melodramatic saying I'd lost all 10,000 + files, probably about 1000 are not backed up yet.
Running XP with all SP3 in.
File system was NTFS
Tried to run check from command prompt but it couldn't find the drive path.
I tried to checkdisk from XP recovery console that's where it said there was no floppy/cd in the drive.
Disk management shows drive as healthy active but lists no file system and shows 100% free. Shows Disk 1 Basic 186.31GB online.
In properties for the drive volume, partition style is shown as mbr, capacity 190780, unallocated 0MB, reserved 0MB
device status is - working properly
Local Disk properties describes file system as RAW, used space 0 bytes free space 0 bytes, capacity 0 bytes
Checkdisk from here doesn't run
Currently running virtual labsuggested to me by my friend. this programme shows if the files are recoverable, then just a matter of how much it costs to recover them.
17 1/2 hours left to run!

[ACtheTROLL]

got to say .... sounds bad ..... and only 171/2 hours to save the world.

Sounds like the partition table is intact but the mft is gone - so simple undelete probably won't work.
I'd start with acronis .... to recover the partition

[scorpioangel]

Oh what fun! Whilst the recovery utility was happily running finding files the computer demon was plotting more evil. At approximately 8.45 pm I got a lovely blue screen with lots of pretty writing telling me that windows was ****** off and had decided to give up, it gave an error which has something to do with a dll file being offloded into the ether or something. So I rebooted my pc and got a load up screen telling me I had no primary hard drive!
I tell you readers, I nearly screamed.
I did the only thing worthwhile at that time - got a drink and went downstairs to watch CSI.
Today I used xp recovery console. I had a corrupted boot sector which i successfully fixed - hoorah!. I ran a checkdisk and it reported about 10500 bytes on my C partition; now last time I looked this was a 20gig partition, so I pushed the chkdsk through and it reported unrecoverable errors, so unrecoverable that I can't boot from the boot drive.
Well I do have two other pcs sat here so I am currently backing up to dvd all the backed up data that I have from the sick pc as well as everythig else i can find - only problem is Nero decided to keep crapping out on me til i spent an hour and half updating it and now i have some indexing service on that hogs all the memory and I can't damn well get rid of.
Tomorrow, I go to work and have to continue reconfiguring our database in order to continue setting up a webportal that the suppliers were too thick to design properly.
Life was much simpler in the 70s No wonder Life on Mars was so popular.
Excuse me while I slit my wrists