Hard drive issue in Win 10

A

andypnb

Gawd
Joined
Dec 18, 2002
Messages
964
This is something I've never run into before and would appreciate some help and advice.

Win 10 desktop has an SSD OS drive and a hd drive for documents. I added a 2TB WD harddrive (was previously used briefly in a Tivo) as Extra space and all was well for some months. Then after the recent Win 10 Anniversary update, the Extra drive no longer appears in Windows as a drive. It shows in BIOS, shows in Device Manager, but not in Drive Management or is the Storage Spaces in Win 10.

Tried uninstalling, tried moving it to another SATA port, tried just about everything and no luck so far. Am I missing something obvious?
 
It sounds like maybe the drive lost its letter that would make it visible. Use the disk management console under Administrative Tools to see if the drive will show up and have a letter assign to it.
 
Unfortunately it does not show up there. This is Device Manager.

upload_2016-10-4_18-40-8.png



This is Disk Management.

upload_2016-10-4_18-41-6.png


The OCZ is the OS C drive. The WD500 is the F/G drives. The WD20EURX was assigned as S and now is absent entirely.
 
andypnb said:
(was previously used briefly in a Tivo)
Click to expand...

Did you reformat the drive as NTFS after using it in the TiVo? I am vaguely aware that a TiVo uses some special format for their HDDs.

You may have better luck seeing the drive with a Linux boot CD or USB stick. Try a Live CD or USB from Ubuntu or Mint. You may wish to disconnect your other drives when booting up with Linux so you don't make any "oh shit" errors when choosing which drive to format if you're not comfortable with Linux.
 
jack57 said:
What about the bottom part of the Disk Management like this?
Click to expand...

upload_2016-10-4_20-47-11.png



evilsofa said:
Did you reformat the drive as NTFS after using it in the TiVo? I am vaguely aware that a TiVo uses some special format for their HDDs.

You may have better luck seeing the drive with a Linux boot CD or USB stick. Try a Live CD or USB from Ubuntu or Mint. You may wish to disconnect your other drives when booting up with Linux so you don't make any "oh shit" errors when choosing which drive to format if you're not comfortable with Linux.
Click to expand...

I did. It worked as a regular drive for weeks or months without issue in the new computer.
 
I see it in BIOS fine. And Device Manager in Win 10. I'll try Diskpart and see.
 
Definitely strange that it shows up in device manager but not diskpart. Sounds like it's time to boot up parted magic or another Linux distro and see if the disk is accessible.
 
So I booted up gparted and the absent drive shows up fine but is labeled as Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSFTRES i think).

No clue from here. Any guidance on what I can do in gparted or some other bootable Linux? I can try using gparted to set the MSFTRES flag to off ?
 
Last edited:
Don't change the flag just yet. If memory serves me correctly, MSFTRES partition is us by the OS for scratch purposes. Pull the drive and see if you can boot without it being present. Sounds like the AU update decided to use the entire GPT partition as scratch space. As long as you can boot without it, you should be able to change the flag and access the data.
 
Last edited:
I can boot without the drive connected with 0 issues. If it's physically disconnected, windows is unaffected. With it connected, it appears in BIOS and Device Manager, but not Disk Management or Explorer.

ANything I can try in windows to get it to redo scratch spaces?
 
Ok, it's sort of back in Windows. I went and turned on the MSFTRES flag off, so there are now no flags in Gparted. I am back at two sections being displayed in Gparted, a 150MB one which is a proper scratch space, and a 1.8TB undefined area. The 1.8TB appears in windows as a healthy unallocated space, so I can probably format it.

But, is there anything I can do to maybe try to recover the data? I have web backups of it, worst case, but I'd prefer not to redownload 500GB if I don't have to. Looking at using TestDisk.

TestDisk is giving me this preliminary issue:

Warning: number of bytes per sector mismatches 4096 (NTFS) != 512 (HD)
HPFS - NTFS 130 203 10 242073 87 22 3886807000
 
Warning: number of bytes per sector mismatches 4096 (NTFS) != 512 (HD)
Click to expand...

This is acting like the drive was one of those external drives that when in the external unit the drive reports 4K physical / 4K logical sectors but when you pull it out and connect it directly to a SATA port it reports 4K physical / 512 logical and then the OS shows it as unformatted because of the sector size change.
 
Yea, it's very odd. I tried changing the sector size to 4096 and that error is gone, but Win still wont recognize it and files. I can always delete the space, format and start over, but I'm hoping not to.
 
Thank you all for your help, but after another weekend of trying to fix it, I gave in and formatted. Triesd photorec and it was plucking files fine, but it would take two months to get through 2TB. Tried all options with testdisk and gparted and there was no getting windows to recognize it and mount it without a format.

Works just fine in Windows now. Ran WD tools scan and no bad sectors. SMART appears OK. Weirdest issue I have ever seen.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top