HDD Disk 0 Unknown Not initialized Problem after forced reboot, Help!

[techiemon]

I have an HDD that is causing some problems after I had to force a reboot when my system locked up. Sadly however now the disk is showing up in computer management as unknown and not initialized. The data is important and much of it is probably not backed up recently. Yeah, I am dumb. But anyway.. I do not want to lose my data or partitions on this disk if possible.

Sadly, this disk was also the location of the indexing file to keep it off the m.2. I moved the paging and indexing to this drive from m.2 ssd because someone told me it would help the m.2 last longer by not constantly being accessed, and I kind of believe him. So I am guessing this forced reboot may have caused the issue on the HDD. I have no idea what brand it is. It is either WD or Toshiba.

What can I do not to lose data and maybe keep everything intact and maybe maybe actually be able to still use the drive just as it is after the fix?

I have seen easeUS and minitool partition software, it seems they offer a solution. The problem is that neither of these two softwares are able to find Disk0. So I am guessing I have to do something within computer management - disk management first, but if I initialize the disk my data is gone. I believe the drive should be NTFS but what I see that pops up when I load disk management is mbr or gpt. I really do not want to lose the data.

So what can I do and what are the steps to try? Thank you

 

[Trap05]

Drive is likely toast. If you have the funds a data recovery center is probably your only option if the data is important enough to pay for. If not replace the drive and beef up your backup solution. Live and learn

 

[techiemon]

Drive is likely toast. If you have the funds a data recovery center is probably your only option if the data is important enough to pay for. If not replace the drive and beef up your backup solution. Live and learn

Why would the drive be toast? Because I rebooted when the system locked up? That sounds a bit far fetched.

 

[Trap05]

It was probably an underlying issue that surfaced when it locked up or the reboot occurred. Or the drive failing caused the lockup which is more likely.

 

[techiemon]

This is not a boot drive. There are no workable programs on that disk either that would have been running prior to the lockup other than the page file system and indexing. And my system is still having problems even without that drive. The lockups were happening prior to this. I think it is a RAM issue as I run Bluestacks a lot and it does lock things up occasionally.

 

[Trap05]

The drive could be blank and still lockup the system. Sounds like you may have multiple issues to sort out.

 

[EarthDog]

Try a different cable and SATA port if you haven't already. Maybe even another PC if possible... if it follows the drive, you know it's likely toast.

 

[unsafesteagle]

See if the drive can be mounted on a Linux system ?

 

[ihrsetrdr]

See if the drive can be mounted on a Linux system ?

+1. Any full distro that has a "live" session, or gparted...https://gparted.org/livecd.php

 

[techiemon]

I have no Linux system to try it on.

I have to laugh when some people just automatically assume a drive is dead. This nonsense has happened to me before, but I forgot how to I dealt with it, but that drive at least showed allocation. This one did not. I pulled the drive out today after trying to power off the system from the power supply button for a few minutes on the request of an engineer who used to work for Synology to reset everything. He said they had some problems like I described also and powering down the computer completely for a few minutes did the trick for a bunch of drives that had similar behavior. Unfortunately that didn't work. So I popped it into a Vantec external USB box, and powered it up, failed the first time. Powered down and then did it again and voila, everything was there, everything was intact, partitions are good, files are fine. But my PC has an issue with doing USB to USB transfers as the drive in the Vantec usually ends up slowing everything down on my computer and takes awhile to load the drive in my computer. And it often fails to transfer files as it loses connection with the pc. So I have to do it all over again. So so far, I have managed to get about 50% of critical files off the drive. I am having to do it slowly, one folder, or a half a folder at a time as it is a 6TB drive and I only have a 2TB external seagate available, so I am being picky right now what comes off. I bought another Seagate Barracuda today 6TB to replace this drive with inside the PC and hopefully will be here tomorrow and I can have more space to continue to remove all the files. So hopefully I will be able to remove everything on the drive. I still have photos and things on another partition that need to be removed.

Unfortunately as this is being run on a Vantec device I cannot get the drive stats to show you all to see if there are any problems with the drive. I may try to replace cables and try again as well. I think there still could be problems with this drive, but I am not sure what.

 

[Trap05]

Still sounds exactly like a failing drive to me

 

[techiemon]

Still sounds exactly like a failing drive to me

Well that very well could be, but it is obviously not dead yet....

Question though.... in my experience a failed drive usually makes all kinds of grinding noises.. seems not all drives will do that when they fail...

 

[Trap05]

That is common sure but they can fail in various ways. Either way get your data ASAP

 

[EarthDog]

Well that very well could be, but it is obviously not dead yet....

Question though.... in my experience a failed drive usually makes all kinds of grinding noises.. seems not all drives will do that when they fail...

... it depends on how they fail. Grinding is obviously something mechanical versus something that can go wrong with the logic board wont make noises.

As far as linux, you have the ability to make a live disk, I'm sure... I think we even gave you a link. Some effort may be required, yes.

but yeah, get that data asap!!!

 

[knoober]

Linux is really the answer here. I will give a quick outline of the process through some links. This is not quite all the steps , but if you tell a search engine what step you get stuck on, I can guarantee there will be results. If you get bogged down with information overload, stop back by this thread with more info about where you got stuck.

1) make a live usb

Create a bootable USB stick with Rufus on Windows | Ubuntu

Ubuntu is an open source software operating system that runs from the desktop, to the cloud, to all your internet connected things.

ubuntu.com

2) mount the disk

How do I mount internal HDDs in Ubuntu via the command line?

I'm new to Linux and have a home server set up running Ubuntu. In the GUI it's very easy to mount my additional internal hard drives. I just double click on them. Since I have made this server he...

superuser.com

3) if you cant mount the disk, then it might mean the disk is dead or corrupted, but there is still hope with photorec

How to use PhotoRec to Recover Deleted Files in Linux/Ubuntu | DigitalOcean

Technical tutorials, Q&A, events — This is an inclusive place where developers can find or lend support and discover new ways to contribute to the community.

www.digitalocean.com