I had one of those windows error messages (the yellow boxes down in right hand corner) that said "windows was unable to backup the file E:\\***\***\whatever. This could be caused by a network or hardware failure" or something similar.
I then went to "My Computer" and the entire E drive is gone. It's not even listed with my other drives.
I've never received that error before, and I have not copied, moved or saved anything to that drive in weeks. I've only had the drive for about 10 months, and this is the first error I've ever received. This came out of nowhere.
Anyone know why I would get this error, and is the drive gone forever?
2007-02-04 05:41:12 · 3 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Other - Hardware
There are a couple of things which could cause a drive to "disappear" apparently. Is your E: drive a 3rd physical disk or simply a partition, i.e., a "logical" drive? The cable may have come loose. You may have been hit with a virus which wiped the boot sector, partition information and FAT. The first thing to try is a simple reboot and see what your BIOS says about drives it finds during the power-on self-test portion of the startup. In my computer, I have my BIOS set to AUTO sense instead of specific numbers for heads, tracks and sectors, so when it starts, I see an identifier on the screen for each physical drive it finds. Does yours display an ID for each hard disk? If not, then it is either the cable or hardware which has failed. The cable is easy to check. When the machine is off, open the case and simply pull each connector off and put it back on. Sometimes, corrosion forms and effectively puts resistence into the connections which makes poor electrical contact, which causes the drive to fail to respond. If the physical drive still is not found by the POST after checking the cable connections, then it is likely failed hardware and it probably is not recoverable on your own. Check your warranty and see if you can return the drive for repair or exchange. Maxtor has very good support on warranty repair or replacement. If the physical drive is found by the BIOS on startup, then it is a software problem, probably a damaged partition table. There are software tools out there that you can use to recover use of the drive, some of which can also recover data. Symantec (Norton Utilities) and Ontrack sell recovery programs.
2007-02-04 06:24:05 · answer #1 · answered by rowlfe 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Is this a brand new hard drive or one salvaged from an old computer? What was the CD he put in? This "error message" sounds like some malware that I have seen on computers that people I know gave up on and gave to me for free. A brand new hard drive would not have any operating system on it fresh out of the box. If it is a salvaged drive, it should be reformatted to delete all the old crap on it before reinstalling the operating system.
2016-05-24 04:12:50 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Hi. First try re-seating your cables. They sometimes work loose.
2007-02-04 06:24:37 · answer #3 · answered by Cirric 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋