Cant see HDD - do I use FIXMBR?
 

Hi lads
My sons hdd D:\ with all his data on it all of a sudden can not be seen by the system. Basically it says "Do you want to format?"

We did have several power cuts last weekend.....

If I boot up with my XP Pro install disk and go to recovery console, and run FIXMBR on device 1 (Device 0 being the C drive) do you think it would fix it?

Or is there a less risky solution?

Cheers

Brett

Fixmbr just fixed issues/replaces the Master Boot Record, which in your case is on the C:\ drive, so it won't help.

You need to try some disk recovery tools on the d:\ drive to see if they can recover any data. Try the standard windows chkdsk first, probably won't work though as it sounds like the drive has lost its partition table or something, which means it's on it's way out or already dead unfortunately. You maybe able to format it, but you will probably still get issues later on.

How important is the data? There are services where you can send the drive away, and they will recover what they can as well.

He doesn't run Norton GoBack does he? It screws with drive IDs and spoofs the actual drive to the OS, and sometimes this can go a bit wrong - meaning that you're left with a drive that Windows doesn't recognise as valid.

That chkdsk sorted it out a treat. Couple of missing files, but no big deal.
Off to get a new HDD now! Cheers. Brett