3Tb HDD vanished from windows

S

Solfaur

n00b
Joined
May 25, 2011
Messages
33
So I own this Western Digital 3TB SATA-III 64MB Caviar Green that I use for storage for several months now. All went fine, no issues up until today when something very strange happend.

When I was making an archive of about 100Gbs on the disk the box started showing up a lot of errors, so I stopped the process and noticed a lot of my files started showing up as "file not found".

So I did a system restart and to my surprise my disk stopped showing up alltogether, just like that. I went to disk managment where it's shown as "Disk 2 746.39 GB Unallocated" like it was when I first installed the drive months ago before formating and configuring...

The disk seems healty enough, it shows up when booting or in HD Tune Pro but just when as Local Disk E as it was up until this happend. The disk was not partioned it was wholy used just for storrage of movies, pictures etc.

I didn't do any format or recovery methods yet because I have no clue how to approach this issue. Any ideeas?
 
First off look at the SMART to see if the drive is dieing. HDTune will have that on the health status.

I have seen this many times when drives die. Although it could be a bad sector on the partition table or other important part of the filesystem structures. If you need to recover the data on the disk,. I recommend ddrescue from a linux livecd to a brand new drive of the same size or larger, then use recovery programs on the copy.
 
I don't see any SMART in HDtune but every status under the Health tab shows "ok". Even ran some Benchmarks, erros scans and all seems fine.

When entering Disk Management it shows the disk as "online" but as mentioned above it's also "unallocated" o_O. So what do you think, is my data still there and should I try some kind of partition recovery or?

I'm not sure if I'm out for buying a new 3tb drive if this turned out to be so out of the blue unreliable and try what you suggested... :( is it the only way?
 
Doesn't HDTune have the ability to show the raw SMART attributes like Reallocated Sectors Count, Reallocation Event Count, Current Pending Sector Count, Offline Uncorrectable ...


If not can you install CrystalDiskInfo and post a screen shot showing these.
 
Posting here instead of 3 other forums at the same time is a good start.
 
Wait a minute. This is a 3TB drive showing up as 800GB. Do your SATA ports support > 2.2TB drives?


BTW, the SMART data looks good to me.
 
Yes, I have been using this 3Tb HDD for storage for more than half a year and it showed up as 2.746Gb, only after this "thing" that happend today it started showing that value...
 
You also need to check whether the disk is set to MBR or GPT. MBR is limited to 2.2TB maximum. GPT is required to access the full 3TB.
 
^ Immedialty after my initial windows reboot after I noticed that my disk "vanished" from Local Hard Disk drives I went to Disk Management and the MBR/GPT window popped, and yes I chose GPT.
 
Solfaur said:
Yes, I have been using this 3Tb HDD for storage for more than half a year and it showed up as 2.746Gb, only after this "thing" that happend today it started showing that value...
Click to expand...

I am thinking you wrote past the 2.2TB portion of the drive and your SATA controller is wrapping around.

Did you switch from Intel SATA II ports to some third party SATA III port?
 
drescherjm when I started creating that blasted archive I had like 800 Gbs left from ~2.700, so it is indeed very possible that I reacheda 2.2Tb disk occupation durring the process when errors started to show up. But the disk was set to GPT when I first installed it 6 months ago and should have supported the capacity.

So do you suggest that I should plug it out of my current sata port and try another one?
 
Solfaur said:
^ Immedialty after my initial windows reboot after I noticed that my disk "vanished" from Local Hard Disk drives I went to Disk Management and the MBR/GPT window popped, and yes I chose GPT.
Click to expand...

In this case, then how old are your system's motherboard and BIOS? Some mobos and BIOSes dated as recently as 2011 do not properly support HDDs larger than 2.2TB.
 
I have a 2010 Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 mobo and I stopped updating the bios somewhere in 2011 since it wasn't really supported anymore.

Atm all my HDD/SSD are in the ICH10R SATA ports, do you think I could try to stick the 3Tb drive to the "gigabyte SATA" ports or Marvell 9128 ones that are free?
 
Solfaur said:
I have a 2010 Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 mobo and I stopped updating the bios somewhere in 2011 since it wasn't really supported anymore.

Atm all my HDD/SSD are in the ICH10R SATA ports, do you think I could try to stick the 3Tb drive to the "gigabyte SATA" ports or Marvell 9128 ones that are free?
Click to expand...

The most recent non-beta BIOS dates from late 2010, and lacks large HDD support.
 
You are right, but I saw this and apparently Gigabyte released http://www.gigabyte.com/microsite/276/3tb.html for 3Tb support even for 32-bit OS and my mobo is included in that list. I even read a review of this particular 3Tb HDD done o my particular mobo model, so surelry there has to be some sort of support or doesn't it?

But if you are right and my HDD stopped working when I hit 2.2Tb does that mean that it's just my mobo having an issue and that I can recover the data if I use the hdd on another computer? or buy a newer mobo?
 
You can recover the data, just don't do any writing/messing around with the drive itself.
 
Do you think I should try and look for one of those beta bioses for my mobo that maybe added support for 3Tb HDDs?
 
So, I updated to the latest official bios for my mobo - F8 that came out April 2011 and apparently has added 3Tb support in it's description. I also moved my drive to a SATA III Marvell connector and this is what shows up after reboot... It did not ask me to choose GBT or MBR... just shows 2794.39 GB unallocated :(. Is there a next step here?




 
In this case, you only need to create a new volume on that disk. Then format it.
 
Well yes but if I do that I will loose all my data, and I don't want that if it's possible... is there no way I can acces those files again even though I didn't do any format or messing with them when my problem occured? :(
 
Somebody around here probably has some partition restore tools to recommend.

Otherwise if you have another disk to dump the files to you can use GetDataBack, Restorer Ultimate, Rstudio, or any other good file restoring utility.
 
I suspect your partition table was corrupted when the data wrapped around. You may be able to recover from that with minimal loss. However I highly recommend you purchase a new 3TB copy the data bit for bit (using a program like dd or ddrescue - available on any linux livecd) and try the recovery on the new disk. Testdisk is a free program that may help. A second option is using getdataback. I believe that will be readonly on the source disk. In either case you need to get your SATA ports to properly handle your 3TB drives and verify that the SATA controller is handling 3TB drive correctly. One way to verify is run a full format on the new 3TB drive. If that succeeds then you should be good to go.
 
What is weird is that when I got this HDD I did run a full format to NTFS and it worked with no problems for several months. But probably when I physically went over 2.2Tb the corruption happend. I'm using O&O DiskRecovery atm and I will leave my pc on for the next 10 hours since it will take like 11 to scan and recover the 3Tb drive.

I'm not ready to hand over the cash for another 3Tb HDD if they seem to be so tricky with my old mobo. If I get to recover at least some of my stuff with this tool I will be happy but I'm not getting my hopes up. I will not risk getting 3Tb drives for storage in the future, at least not on my current setup.... All my movies/pictures/musci collection gone just like that. :mad:
 
A lot of the recovery tools are excellent at recovering data. Your data is still there, it doesn't just disappear.

Now that you mention it though I had a similar thing happen to a 3TB drive of mine a while back, for me it was the Rapid Storage Drivers, I had to update to the latest ones after the thing bunked out after going above 2.2TB.

As long as you throw the data to another drive. Is there room on your 2TB to throw most of the data on?
 
Solfaur said:
I have a 2010 Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 mobo and I stopped updating the bios somewhere in 2011 since it wasn't really supported anymore.

Atm all my HDD/SSD are in the ICH10R SATA ports, do you think I could try to stick the 3Tb drive to the "gigabyte SATA" ports or Marvell 9128 ones that are free?
Click to expand...

I have a hard time believing ICH10R SATA ports cannot handle 3TB drives properly. I used to have an Asus P5B-Deluxe (965 chipset, from 2006) with ICH8R that handled 3TB data drives fine (never tried booting from them), and this was with a BIOS from 2008ish (Win7 x64 SP1). I definitely wrote over 2.2TB of data to those drives as well.

The few posts above this one are good advice on attempting to recover the partition table and save your data.
 
rive22 said:
A lot of the recovery tools are excellent at recovering data. Your data is still there, it doesn't just disappear.

Now that you mention it though I had a similar thing happen to a 3TB drive of mine a while back, for me it was the Rapid Storage Drivers, I had to update to the latest ones after the thing bunked out after going above 2.2TB.

As long as you throw the data to another drive. Is there room on your 2TB to throw most of the data on?
Click to expand...

Well I do have like 1.25 TB space on my gaming raid0, and from the data that was on the 3TB one I only need to recover 500-800 Gbs max. It's still 4 hours left untill O&O DiskRecovey finishes so I'll have to hope for the best, but really I'm so dissapointed by this whole thing.

I will look out for some new Rapid Storage drivers as well later on, and try to bring all the data back, but I won't have my hopes too high. Anyway, I will probably grab a z77 platform in the next weeks wich will probably have full 3Tb hdd support amongst other features and also buy an external drive that will be >>>backup only<<< for my utmost important stuff so I can avoid such things in the future.

Lesson learned that's for sure...:(
 
grambo said:
I have a hard time believing ICH10R SATA ports cannot handle 3TB drives properly. I used to have an Asus P5B-Deluxe (965 chipset, from 2006) with ICH8R that handled 3TB data drives fine (never tried booting from them), and this was with a BIOS from 2008ish (Win7 x64 SP1). I definitely wrote over 2.2TB of data to those drives as well.

The few posts above this one are good advice on attempting to recover the partition table and save your data.
Click to expand...

Yea I thought it weird myself but it happend... and it was most probably my mobo's/bios fault since the hdd looks healthy enough.
 
I had the same thing happen to me. I have written a form letter to collect information about this problem:

When I went out of town for a day on June 22, my computer was working reasonably well. When I booted it for the first time on my return on June 23, I discovered that my Windows 7 (64-bit) computer had lost the ability to access my 1 year-old, 3 TB WD Caviar Green internal hard drive. On booting, the system said that one of my drives needed to be checked for consistency, but on checking, it could only display several lines of failed file record segments, beginning at Segment 64. After a lot of work, I've managed to retrieve virtually all of my files, though some of them are corrupted to various degrees.

In hunting around the Web, I'm noticing a few other people reporting the same problem at about the same time. This could be just a coincidence; WD hard drives supposedly have a high failure rate, lately. But, 2 other common oddities take place, too:

1) The hard drives are almost full when they fail. Someone suggested to one victim that his drive wrote past the 2.2 TB boundary and the SATA controller wrapped around.

2) Leap second was June 30/July 1, and several computer systems around the world crashed when they did not handle it correctly.

I cannot find a good correlation between the drive failure and the leap second; these failures take place before the leap second does. It just seems odd that so many would happen in the middle or end of June.

Other problems that cropped on my computer about the same time:

3) I also can no longer play Flash in Firefox.

4) Microsoft Word 2003 often stops responding for a few minutes, beginning immediately after the program loads.

I am looking for any information that might relate to this issue.

Incidentally, a lot of file recovery software could not access my 3 TB hard drive, but I found a few that could. I believe the difference is that a lot of file recovery software cannot access GPT partitions (they are stuck in the MBR world). Of those that can access my GPT partition, I chose to register the one recommended to me by FileHippo, as it worked and was the least expensive. I used MagicCute Data Recovery to recover my files off my 3 TB partition.
 
Hey Opcode, so you managed to recover your 3TB files with MagicCute Data Recovery? I tried several software and non seems to do the tirck.

I also tried to acces my drive thorugh a linux live boot cd, but somehow whenever I enter linux and try to use gparted my Mouse and Keyboard are not responding, or better said I can move my mouse but clicks do not work... I downloaded and burned the latest linux live gparted and same issue, even plugged in my old non-usb mouse and same issue..
 
Did you try Restorer Ultimate? I've used that software many many times.
 
What I did use was O&O DiskRecovery Tech Edition. After 26 hours it actually found pretty much all my 1.98 TB of data BUT (and this is a BIG but) it does not recover my file and folder names and structure, so I have for example 200 GBs of AVI (F005678.AVI, F005980.AVI, F008658.AVI etc.), then BMPs same thing with every other extension/file type.

And since I have hundreds of videos/pictures a recovery without the actual names of all of them is near useless. :(

There are also things like System Volume Information (shouldn't that help rebuild my partition??) but everything is so messed up.

Here's a pic to understand what I'm talking about:

 
Partitions disappear sometimes, it has happened to me several times, always on 2TB or less drives, so I doubt it has anything to do with the size.

I buy HDD in pairs and backup everything.

As for 3TB support, I managed to get a WD 3TB green working on a DFI NF4 from 2004.
 
Partitions disappear sometimes, it has happened to me several times, always on 2TB or less drives, so I doubt it has anything to do with the size.
Click to expand...

Must be a luck factor in that. At work where I have 100s of drives over the last 15+ years I have never had a single hard drive do that on windows or linux. Although if the partition sector has a URE that can happen and it should be recoverable if you knew the exact layout of the disk before the corrupt partition table. In linux I know you can zero the partition table or then recreate it and all will be well if you get all the partitions the same size as they were before you zeroed the table. Many times I have used a variation of that to expand partitions when moving to a larger disk. I mean make a bit for bit copy of a small disk to a larger disk, then erase the last partition from the large disk and recreate it at the same starting point but extend its size to the rest of the disk then finally use the filesystem extend tool to extend the filesystem to the size of the partition containing it.
 
Last edited:
Hey drescherjm, are you saying that if I would use a linux live (gparted to be more precise, wich I tried but my mouse's click and keyboard does not work for some reason) boot cd I could recover my whole partition in the same way it used to look?

Because as you can see in my last screenshot, I did a 28 hour scan with O&O and it did find pretty much all my files but the names of the files and folders and their structure is pretty much randomized. And considering I have 100s of videos and pictures you can imagine this beeing quite the pain.

So is there a way to recover my files and folders in their original partition's structure or should I happy that I can manage to save some of it this way?
 
I didn't, all I did was after the initial restart when I entered disk management and the disk was only seen as 800~ gb it automatically converted to gpt. Then I updated mobo bios, and when the drive was again seen as 2.7TB I ran O&O discrecovery with the above given result.

Oh well, I guess it's a done deal. At least I managed to get part of my file names by looking at the recovered videos and pictures (only about 50%, rest are corrupted) so I can redownlaod them in the future.

Think I will also RMA this 3 TB drive and try to get a refund and get 2 TB or smaller ones... and always back-up. -.- Lesson learned.
 
Try the other programs. You are giving up too easily and putting all your eggs in one basket.
 
rive22 said:
Try the other programs. You are giving up too easily and putting all your eggs in one basket.
Click to expand...

Problem is there are very few programs that restore GPT 3TB partitions, O&O is one of the few and probably best amongst them. :(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top