Disk unavailable

[pjaj]

System is XP Pro / SP2 + 3GHz Athlom + 1.5 Gb RAM
6 disk drives each 120Gb set up as C D and a 4 disk RAID 5 array E all using EIDE not SATA. All formated NTFS.
C shares IEDE with CD burner, D shares EIDE with DVD burner.

48 hours ago Windows Explorer reported that

"D:\refers to a location that is unavailable. It could be on a hard drive onthis computer, or on anetwork yadda yadda yadda"

This was in an error box titled "My Documents" not "My Computer"!

Clicking on D a second time gives a much terser box (still "My Documents")

"D:\ is not accessible. The parameters are incorrect"

No other program can access it either.

I've tried all the obvious thigs:
check and swap porwer and EIDE cables.
System restore to a time (4 days ago) when the disk was definitely working.
No luck.

As is usual in these cases, the last backup was a month ago .

Any ideas what I can try now, or is the disk completely dead?
I'm thinking of trying a data recovery firm, but that would be V expensive.

[ocher_raindrops]

Do you know if the drive even spins?

[meese]

You may want to download and run the diagnostic utilities from the manufacturer of the drive and see if it finds any errors.

[pjaj]

Yup, the disk spins and the heads move when the drive is powered up.
I'll see if Maxtor have any utilities.

Peter.

[meese]

You may want to read through this:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hard..._20935413.html

Also if no errors are found by Maxtor diagnostic tools you may want to remove the drive and see if it can be read in another system. Does this drive have an OS on it or just for data?

[pjaj]

Maxtor utilities say drive is completely OK.
One clue is that it has lost the name I gave it, just shows up as "Local Disk (D)" instead of "Disk D - Data (D)"

There is no OS or executable programs on the drive, only data.

Another thing I'll try is to find a bootable CD / floppy that can read NTFS and see if that can read the disk.

Peter

[fakan]

have your tried some other apz like Norton disk doctor or partition magic ?

can you do image of the drive right now ? if you could I would make a image so if something goes really wrong you don’t loose all your data.

What about data recovery software have you tried that??

if you get out your data you can format the hardrive which is your best option I think

[DoctorReno]

I don't know if this will help but try going into Disk Management and see what it displays for your D: drive. You might also check the device manager to see if there is a conflict. Probably wasting your time with these suggestions but even a blind squirrel finds a nut once and in a while.

Good luck. Sounds like you have pretty kicking system except for this glitch.

[pjaj]

Interesting.

Disk Management shows that it thinks the D drive is
a) Partition - correct the whole physical drive is set up as the D drive
b) Basic - I don't quite know what this means, but all the drives are this, so I guess it's OK
c) NO FILE SYSTEM !
d) Status - Healthy
e) 100% free !

However I booted up a Linux CD that know about NTFS (the recovery disk from Paragon's Drive Backup) and there was the D drive, alive and well. So I could copy all the files off onto the RAID array and burn some backup CDs as well.

At least I've got my data back, albeit not where I wanted it.

It looks as if Windows has lost its way into the NTFS and thinks the disk is unformatted. But why a third party utility can still get into a proprietary file system beats me. What I need now is a utility that will reconnect / rebuild the NTFS.

I'll keep you posted on any progress.

Peter.

[meese]

Quote:

It looks as if Windows has lost its way into the NTFS and thinks the disk is unformatted. But why a third party utility can still get into a proprietary file system beats me

Well, at this point, there is no file system that windows recognizes. It almost seems like your file system was some how changed.