[qanda]This thread is about the Hitachi DeskStar 7K250 - hard drive - 250 GB - ATA 100. Click here to see full specs[/qanda]hi all.
My name is Andrew (duh) and I am new here. I have to admit I joined specifically to ask this question pertaining to my 1.5 year old hdd. It asked me this already but I will mention that it is a hitachi deskstar 250gig. I was using it for mass storage of digital photos and videos. There was a 48 gig partition and a 200. What would happen is that after a few days w/o a reboot, the drive (and the cd/r that was slaved in on my pata channel) would just disappear. on reboot they would be back, no problems. About a week ago, I noticed they were gone and rebooted to get them back. Nothing. AT first no big deal, I didn’t think about it again until I realized the implications of what was on the drive.
first I swapped the cd/r and the hdd as slave/master and could then only see the cd/r. Then I took the cd/r out all together and got it to SEE the drive… But with a catch. If you right click it and select properties, it shows it as being in RAW format and having 0 bytes used and 0 bytes available.
I went into control panel/admin/comp management/ disk management and there it shows up as a single 31 gig partition with no label (the volume was labeled prior to this debacle). If I try to look at it in my computer it gives me the whole “drive is not formatted, would you like to format now?” hoopla.
I see this drive as a master on the ide channel on the bios flash during boot up. I have read a bunch of crap about freezing drives and doing all sorts of esoteric things to them to get 20 minutes out of them to retrieve data. And for the contempt I feel for those solutions will not deter me from trying them if enough people tell me it’s the thing to do. I know the data is still there, I would appreciate any suggestions anyone had to offer.
Thanks in advance…