Missing SATA Drive on Vista Ultimate Machine

[Wenzel]

I have a home built PC running Vista Ultimate - recently encountered issue
where 1TB SATA HDD (used for backups and data storage - not primary drive) is
no longer recognised by the PC.

The HDD itself seems to be working - if I remove it and connect to another
box it seems OK. All the cabling and connectors also seem OK.

I've tried to reinstall by deleting and reinstalling drivers etc - nothing
seems to work.

Ideas/suggestions appreciated

Rgds

Wenzel

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Is the drive being detected in the system BIOS?

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Richard Urban]

Internal drive or external drive?

Either way, check/replace the cable. Also, the port you attach to may have
gone south. It happens.

 

[Wenzel]

Thanks for the quick response

HDD is a Seagate - internal not external.

Have amanged to get it to detect in Windows Device Manager - but unable to
load volume - file system is RAW in the Logical Disk Management tool.

I ran GetDataBack (GDB) from Runtime Software - this shows that the data is
still on the drive - biggest problem if I decide to do a restore using GDB is
that I don't have enough disk storgae elsewhere to restore to so
..............?

Not sure if rebuilding the MBR would be enough or if this might cause more
issues (???)

Thanks in advance for other suggestions.

Wenzel

 

[Richard Urban]

If the file system is RAW you will have to create, and then format, a
partition on the drive.

If there is information on the drive now there are recovery programs that
can get at the files and copy them to another drive. Then, you do as I said
above - after you have recovered what you need.

I use EasyRecovery Professional. There is a special module just for
recovering files from a RAW partition.