Hard drive disappeared

Can anyone help?
My hard drive is split into a C and a D drive, when I turned my computer on this morning the D drive was completely gone.
I tried to use system restore to retrieve it and got this message
Changes to drive d cannot be reversed because the drive was either excluded form system restore or removed.
Please help thank you.

 

What does it say in disk management? goto control panel>admin tools>computer management>disk management... you should see all your drives and partitions there. Take note of your D: drive and see if there are any abnormalities there.

Also don't you have a CD or DVD drive? Normally the CD drive is D: in windows, so assigning a partition as D: may have screwed things up.

 

Thank you for replying I have done as you instructed.
I do have a cd drive and a dvd drive these are listed on my computer as E and F drives.
In disk management C is listed as disk 0, basic primary partition, the next disk is listed as disk 1 not intialized and unallocated, I tried initializing this disk but nothing happened

 

You don't have to worry about drive letter assignments for a CD or DVD drive messing up a partition on a hard drive. The operating system assigns drive letters based on what the BIOS sees when it reads the Master Boot Record (MBR) on each installed drive; the OS does not assign drive letters to optical drives until letters have been assigned to all recognizable partitions on all hard drives installed. Adding a partition to a hard drive results in higher drive letters being assigned to the CD-ROM and DVD drives.

It seems that something messed up the partition table or boot record (probably the latter) for your D: drive, with the result that your OS couldn't recognise the partition as a valid drive.The OS will often report such a partition as "uninitialized" or "not formatted"; what the OS is really saying is that it does not recognise whatever formatting is there -- if any. If you're running Windows XP (you haven't said), it can read the FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS formats. It can't read the HPFS or Linux/Unix formats, and may report those as invalid partitions or as unformatted partitions even though there is absolutely nothing wrong with the drive.

You didn't say what you did to "initialize" your D: drive after seeing the error message you described. Nor did you say what error message you got (if any) when you tried. It would be helpful to have that information. But bear in mind that a successful initialization will usually destroy all data on that partition.

Damage to a hard drive boot record is unusual unless you did something unusual. There are also some viruses that attack the boot record as a way of making data inaccessible. So -- did you attempt to install anything that might conceivably have written to the boot record immediately before your D: drive disappeared? If so, let's have the details.

And have you scanned your system for viruses lately -- with an up-to-date scanner? That's one scan that should be done after booting from a known-clean boot disk. Viruses that attack boot records usually install themselves in the Master Boot Record, and will therefore take control of the system and hide themselves before any operating system can start. You defeat that gambit by starting from a clean boot disk instead of from your hard drive.

 

I am running windows xp.
I tried to initialize the disk by right clicking on the disk box in disk management, this gave me the option to "initialize disk" I clicked yes, the box closed and nothing happened.
I regularly run ad-aware , spybot and other virus scanners some of these were on my d drive, so I have ran the ones I have remaining,and removed anything they detected.They did not seem to find anything unusual.
I have not installed anything new recently, I was downloading mp3,s yesterday to the D drive. Could I have downloaded a virus that has attacked my boot record this way?
Thank you.

 

Nothing at all? Not even an "OK"?

If you check my sig block, you'll see I run Windows 98SE, not XP. Is there an XP expert out there that wants to comment?

I suppose it's possible, but I think it's extremely unlikely. Perhaps someone else will comment on that.

Another possibility: have you run a surface scan on the drive recently? If not, you might want to do that just to be sure that the drive isn't starting to fail. A sector gone bad where the boot record was is not impossible. It just makes you extraordinarily unlucky.

If you get any bad sectors, replace the entire drive ASAP. The odds of increasing deterioration are good, and it will likely spread to both partitions on your drive.

 

My understanding was that you could only initialize a physical disk, and that partitions themselves can't be initialized as it's only an option if you right click the physical disk(which would normally be a new disk with no file system installed that you just installed into your system.) So I don't see how you could even boot the system if your drive is unintialized

 

he said he has 1 drive split into 2 partitions and only the D partition is not recognized by windows.

my advice is do a chkdsk from the command prompt.

go to start>run type cmd.
type chkdsk and see what it reports.

 

but the initialize command is located in the left hand column, you can't initialize a partition only disks. You would do that before you install a file system.

this is what I mean:

http://www.bay-wolf.com/setupmedbay.htm

look at step 3

I honestly think he's going to have to use a data recovery tool.

 

It seems that WinXP-speak includes partitioning as part of initialization. But Microsoft likes to redefine things to suit its own world-view, and has been known to ignore de facto standards on several occasions. It gets away with those things because of its effective monopoly in desktop PC operating systems.

The term "initialize" has been used elsewhere as a synonym for formatting alone -- but one formats a partition, not the entire disk (unless the disk contains only a single partition). See <http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/initdisks.html> and <http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/i/initialize.html>. "Initialize" can also refer to a floppy disk -- and those don't get partitioned.

But yes, I suspect that grantlee is going to have to look at data recovery tools for his D: drive.

 

Having read all the replies and relative articles, I searched for further information on google about disk partitions, formatting, initializing etc.
When I returned to disk management, to my astonishment windows was now recognising an unallocated disk the same size as my lost D drive, I formatted this and now have my D disk back without any of the data!!!!
The only things I have done on my computer since I last looked in disk management were a virus scan and a surface scan on the C drive as recommended.
I have never had anything like this happen previously with my computer and I am now less than confident about putting any software or files on this drive.

Thanks to everyone who replied.

 

Given that the cause of the data loss remains unexplained, I'd still suggest a regular surface scan to eliminate one of the possible causes.

Current IDE hard drives have built-in ability to mark out a bad sector and substitute a spare, so you won't see a bad sector under normal circumstances. The formatting process also marks bad sectors and prevents them from being used.

But there are only so many spare sectors available to replace a sector gone bad. If bad sectors begin to appear, further data loss is likely.