My harddrive changed partitions by itself

watdahel

watdahel

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 8, 2010
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I have a harddrive which I used as a backup storage. I backup my most important data on it every six months or so and then unplug it from the computer in hopes of minimizing wear. I formerly used the drive as my OS drive. I have since repartitioned and reformatted it to occupy the entire disk. Today when I checked for my data I was disgusted to find they were all gone minus some bits of data that shouldn't be there at all. The partition that exists now only has a fraction of the drive capacity and the remaining is marked unallocated. The SMART status is not throwing any warning either.

Anyone experienced something like this? Is it possible that by being inactive for long periods of time and powering up on occasion is actually detrimental to the health of a harddrive? I've had one other drive do the same thing two years ago. I checked the SMART and it does show bad sector allocation but hasn't exceeded the limit.
 
Very fishy. Length of time off vs on shouldn't make any difference. Virus scan? What OS are you using? What utility did you use to view the drive?
 
Show us the SMART output.

You can use raw partition recovery utilities, assuming you're using NTFS filesystem.
 
I'm using Windows XP. I use the drive to drag and drop my files to backup. I recovered most of my files with a recovery software. I used Windows partitioning tool and ran chkdsk.exe command tool and everything was OK. I was able to reformat the drive again with full drive capacity, but I'm tossing this drive. It's just unbelievable how the partitioning changed and losing my data. The SMART doesn't appear to be accurate. The Power On Hours is not accurate. According to it the drive has been on 24-7 for more than 3 years. I don't run 24-7 of course.





HD Tune: Maxtor 6Y080P0 Health

ID Current Worst ThresholdData Status
(03) Spin Up Time 224 222 63 10401 Ok
(04) Start/Stop Count 250 250 0 6198 Ok
(05) Reallocated Sector Count 253 253 63 10 Ok
(06) Read Channel Margin 253 253 100 0 Ok
(07) Seek Error Rate 253 251 0 0 Ok
(08) Seek Time Performance 249 242 187 46916 Ok
(09) Power On Hours Count 220 220 0 34832 Ok
(0A) Spin Retry Count 253 252 157 0 Ok
(0B) Calibration Retry Count 253 252 223 0 Ok
(0C) Power Cycle Count 246 246 0 2996 Ok
(C0) Power Off Retract Count 253 253 0 0 Ok
(C1) Load Cycle Count 253 253 0 0 Ok
(C2) Temperature 253 253 0 20 Ok
(C3) Hardware ECC Recovered 253 252 0 2912 Ok
(C4) Reallocated Event Count 250 250 0 3 Ok
(C5) Current Pending Sector 253 253 0 0 Ok
(C6) Offline Uncorrectable 252 252 0 1 Ok
(C7) Ultra DMA CRC Error Count 197 188 0 12 Ok
(C8) Write Error Rate 253 252 0 0 Ok
(C9) TA Counter Detected 253 252 0 7 Ok
(CA) TA Counter Increased 253 249 0 0 Ok
(CB) Run Out Cancel 253 252 180 2 Ok
(CC) Soft ECC Correction 253 252 0 0 Ok
(CD) Thermal Asperity Rate 253 252 0 0 Ok
(CF) Spin High Current 253 252 0 0 Ok
(D0) Spin Buzz 253 252 0 0 Ok
(D1) Offline Seek Performance 193 188 0 0 Ok
(63) (unknown attribute) 253 253 0 0 Ok
(64) (unknown attribute) 253 253 0 0 Ok
(65) (unknown attribute) 253 253 0 0 Ok

Power On Time : 34832
Health Status : Ok
 
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