Recent event caused hard drive not recognized in bios

Hello all.

I have a fairly new laptop from Compaq, equipped with Vista. I'm no computer guru and I think I may have made a pretty big mistake. I'll start off with an obvious mistake I made. Trying to delete the contents in the partition D drive, where I know now that the contents holds the recovery files. I never backed up my computer to any of my own disks, but I am about to make an order of the Recovery Disk online.

Anyways, my problem is this. I tried reformatting the D drive, but it failed. Halfway through, it seems as though something went wrong, but I don't remember the error. So, I tried doing the same process again, and this time, the drive does not seem to be there. It now shows 0 bytes on free space, used space, etc.

I went into BIOs, and to the unfortunate, it's not recognized there as well. It's just showing "Partition: 1".

I honestly don't know what is wrong. At this point, I wished to get the Drive back working again. I never touched any cables, nor have I opened up the laptop to mess with anything before.

Here's my question. Is there any ways I can fix this? Also, since I really want a clean start to my laptop, if I do a full restore using the Recovery Disk, will this fix the problem I am having?

(I do understand that the HD may fail and is no longer working, but I just have doubts on that since this is a new laptop)

Any help would be appreciated.



To sum it up:
- Tried reformatting the D Drive, and did not complete
- Partition D Drive is now shown in Windows with with 0 bytes of free space, etc.
- In BIOs, only one drive is shown, the C Drive, not the D Drive
- New laptop, haven't been abused. Would rather not go through warranty troubles.
- Will a full restore with Recovery Disk solve every problem, including this?

 

Drive D: was just a partition, meaning you have one hard drive divided in to two partitions: drive C: and drive D:. Partitions do NOT appear in the BIOS, only hard drives appear in BIOS. So if you had one hard drive with 10 partitions, BIOS would not show all 10 partitions, just the one hard drive. Since you tried to format partition D: and it failed, this would explain why you get odd readings about partition D:. The D: partition was the restore partition and you're getting some restore discs, so D: is not really that important, nor is the fact that it shows "0 bytes free" a problem either. Restore partitions are rarely more than 10gb in size, so you're not really losing any space either. Compaq probably has the info for D: "locked" to read that it has zero free space. Personally, I wouldn't really worry about it if the PC is running OK, and since you have restore CDs on the way, the D: partition would serve no purpose anyway. You also asked "Will a full restore with Recovery Disk solve every problem, including this?"; like I said, I don't see this as a 'problem', but to answer your question, I don't think the factory discs will restore the D: partition, but they might. I can't know for sure without having used the exact same set of discs. Just keep in mind that running a full restore from the factory recovery discs (or from the recovery partition if available) will COMPLETELY wipe out EVERYTHING on the drive, including pictures, music, documents, any games or programs you installed or downloaded yourself. So back up anything you might want to keep by burning CDs or by using external USB drives or flash drives. After running the recovery discs, the PC will be exactly how it was the very first day you powered it on for the first time.
I hope I helped clear things up a bit!

 

dlb, you cleared up more than I asked for. I am very grateful of your help. I do understand a lot more now.

I do have everything backed up and ready to be fully restored. I have a few problems with the Vista that I would like to get it fixed. Instead of going through the troubles to fix them individually, I would rather wipe out the system and go clean. Since I know what might have caused the problem I could avoid having this outcome again.

You made a lot of sence. Hopefully I will get everything back in working order again. It's nice to know that Drive D is just part of the hard drive divided in 2.

Thank you dlb