16th May 2015, 7:23 PM
Okay, I'm having issues with a hard drive, and I wonder if anyone can help.
I have Windows Vista, and there are 4 hard drives in the system (two 320GB drives, a 500GB, and 2TB). One of the four SATA ports on the motherboard broke off several years ago, so I got a PCI SATA card for one of the drives. The 500GB drive is the one attached to the PCI card. I recently got a 4TB external drive, which uses USB.
Some time (I don't know how long, for a while I didn't notice the drive was missing... :p) after moving a bunch of stuff over to the new drive, the 500GB drive, the one attached to the PCI card, has vanished from Windows. Neither the drive nor any of its partitions exist in Disk Management, and the disk does not appear in the Device Manager either. The drive isn't listed in the system BIOS either, but since it's attached to a PCI card and not the system, that might be expected. The drive IS listed in the PCI card's RAID-settings BIOS, which is by Silicon Image, but you can't do anything there except set up RAID options, which I'm not using. So I knew the drive wasn't totally dead, something (I have no clue what) just went very wrong.
Next, I tried attaching the drive to the motherboard, using the SATA port that the 2TB drive is on (I forget which of the two physical 320GBs is the boot drive, so I didn't want to mess with those unless I have to). I didn't attach the 2TB to anything, just left it unconnected. This... caused Windows to fail to correctly boot -- the screen went black after the Windows logon screen (where you choose an account and enter your password). I could get the Task Manager to open and get to a few things through that, but it didn't really work. This was quite concerning to say the least.
After this, I re-hooked up stuff the way it was at first -- 2TB to motherboard, 500GB to PCI card. If the problem is something relating to the PCI card, I don't want to mess up some other drive too by hooking it up to it...
Most recently, I tried a Linux boot DVD that I made several months back, to see if I'd get any farther there. Here things get interesting -- Linux can see the 500GB drive! Now, the 500GB drive has three partitions on it, two about 220GBs and one about 9GB. Linux could see, and access, two of those partitions, the small one and one of the 220GB ones. I copied some files off of both partitions to another partition and it worked fine; access was slow, but it's doing it off of an OS on a DVD, so maybe that was a factor. Anyway, it worked with no problems.
Now, the third partition, called Amur, is an issue; Linux can't mount that drive. It can see the partition name and the amount of data on the partition (~120GB full of ~220GB), which is correct, but can't open (mount) the drive. Maybe this is related to why Windows can't see the drive at all? The OS gives the error message "This location could not be displayed. Sorry, could not display all the contents of “Amur”: Error when getting information for file '/media/ubuntu/Amur/$RECYCLE.BIN': Input/output error". Hmm.. interesting; I don't know what it means, but it's something different anyway. Is there any way of fixing this and gaining access to the drive again?
Going back to Windows afterwards, the drive still doesn't exist in either the Disk or Device Managers. Other partition management programs in Windows cannot see the disk either.
So uh... any help here? I'd prefer to not lose the data on the drive (I could at least copy over the two partitions Linux can see to another drive, but not the other one of course), but anything that gets the drive working again would be great.
I have Windows Vista, and there are 4 hard drives in the system (two 320GB drives, a 500GB, and 2TB). One of the four SATA ports on the motherboard broke off several years ago, so I got a PCI SATA card for one of the drives. The 500GB drive is the one attached to the PCI card. I recently got a 4TB external drive, which uses USB.
Some time (I don't know how long, for a while I didn't notice the drive was missing... :p) after moving a bunch of stuff over to the new drive, the 500GB drive, the one attached to the PCI card, has vanished from Windows. Neither the drive nor any of its partitions exist in Disk Management, and the disk does not appear in the Device Manager either. The drive isn't listed in the system BIOS either, but since it's attached to a PCI card and not the system, that might be expected. The drive IS listed in the PCI card's RAID-settings BIOS, which is by Silicon Image, but you can't do anything there except set up RAID options, which I'm not using. So I knew the drive wasn't totally dead, something (I have no clue what) just went very wrong.
Next, I tried attaching the drive to the motherboard, using the SATA port that the 2TB drive is on (I forget which of the two physical 320GBs is the boot drive, so I didn't want to mess with those unless I have to). I didn't attach the 2TB to anything, just left it unconnected. This... caused Windows to fail to correctly boot -- the screen went black after the Windows logon screen (where you choose an account and enter your password). I could get the Task Manager to open and get to a few things through that, but it didn't really work. This was quite concerning to say the least.
After this, I re-hooked up stuff the way it was at first -- 2TB to motherboard, 500GB to PCI card. If the problem is something relating to the PCI card, I don't want to mess up some other drive too by hooking it up to it...
Most recently, I tried a Linux boot DVD that I made several months back, to see if I'd get any farther there. Here things get interesting -- Linux can see the 500GB drive! Now, the 500GB drive has three partitions on it, two about 220GBs and one about 9GB. Linux could see, and access, two of those partitions, the small one and one of the 220GB ones. I copied some files off of both partitions to another partition and it worked fine; access was slow, but it's doing it off of an OS on a DVD, so maybe that was a factor. Anyway, it worked with no problems.
Now, the third partition, called Amur, is an issue; Linux can't mount that drive. It can see the partition name and the amount of data on the partition (~120GB full of ~220GB), which is correct, but can't open (mount) the drive. Maybe this is related to why Windows can't see the drive at all? The OS gives the error message "This location could not be displayed. Sorry, could not display all the contents of “Amur”: Error when getting information for file '/media/ubuntu/Amur/$RECYCLE.BIN': Input/output error". Hmm.. interesting; I don't know what it means, but it's something different anyway. Is there any way of fixing this and gaining access to the drive again?
Going back to Windows afterwards, the drive still doesn't exist in either the Disk or Device Managers. Other partition management programs in Windows cannot see the disk either.
So uh... any help here? I'd prefer to not lose the data on the drive (I could at least copy over the two partitions Linux can see to another drive, but not the other one of course), but anything that gets the drive working again would be great.