WTF, HD lost it's formatting

One day it was formatted and the next it was raw. Partition was still there. I did a quick format and checked it with HD Sentinel and CDI and both say the drive is perfect. I'm currently doing a long format to see if any bad sectors show up.

Any ideas on what might have happened here?

P.S. All data was backed up so no data recovery needed.

Possibly due to Windows 10 anniversary update?

Nope, it's in a Windows Server 2012 R2 box.

Still formatting.

I've seen this happen before. Basically, the drive lost the File Allocation Table.

You can usually recover the drive contents by restoring a backup FAT without having to reformat.

The drive is dying, even if it formats properly and finds no bad sectors, the same thing will happen again.

I've never seen a S.M.A.R.T error when this starts happening either.

I've also see similar cases where the drive will lose the partition table.

Thanks. It formatted just fine and no smart errors. But after this, I don't trust it so I replaced it. I'll continue to use it for non critical purposes but will keep an eye on it. Just goes to show how important a good backup plan is.

I hat this happen to me after connecting a LaCie external drive to my PC. I have not used the drive since. Does anyone know of a way I can recover its contents?

rkd29980 said:

I hat this happen to me after connecting a LaCie external drive to my PC. I have not used the drive since. Does anyone know of a way I can recover its contents?

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Put the drive in a different enclosure. I had this happen on several Maxtor externals (when they were bought out by Seagate, so they had Seagate drives inside them)... turns out the host controller in the enclosure was faulty and prone to just not letting the drive be accessible anymore. Was able to continue using the drive AND see all the files on it after I put it in a new enclosure. Might work for you. Those SATA to USB host controllers really tend to be more trouble than they're worth.

rat said:

Put the drive in a different enclosure....

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The think this external LaCie enclosure is of the kind that has two drives in it configured as raid 0. So unless I can find this exact same enclosure, that won't work.

Was there a large change in temperature?
This will shift the location of the tracks slightly.
The head servos compensate for temp differences but extreme cold or heat can cause problems.
Whether that is when data was written and now it fails under normal use, or if the temp used now is an extreme.

ie if you power the drive up very cold and a write is made, it can trash data close by on an unintended part of the drive.
The IBM Deathstar drives that caused the company selloff were early glass platter disks which expanded and contracted too much during normal use.

Its possible there is a problem with the temperature sensing, it can happen.
Keep the drive backed up and see how it fares.
Take note of how cold it is on power up and how hot it gets during use.

ps what drive is it?

Seagate bridge boards have built in LBA translators hence why you can format upto 16TB drives as FAT32. These drives wont show up on other bridge boards or SATA controllers. Drives under 2TB will work as normal though. Also normally formatted drives larger than 2TB wont show up with the seagate bridgeboards. Both WDC and Toshiba does not do LBA translations like this and will work fine as is. But those formated wont show up under seagate bridge boards either.. LaCie now being part of seagate might be compatable..