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Hard drive is now empty

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24fps

Technical User
Jun 18, 2006
2
CA


Hi all,


First post here, looks like a great community :).

Well I had a power outage today and when my computer went back online I had a post code with an error message telling me that S.M.A.R.T had detected a problem with my Sec Master, it suggested to backup and replace.

The bios showed my HD properly but through XP the device was now called "local drive" instead of "music/film".

I wasn't that all surprised by the error message because that drive has given me a lot of bad clusters lately and I was preparing to get rid of it anyway.

When i check in the disk manager the drive was there showing me it was 100% empty.

Now what puzzles me is why would I get that S.M.A.R.T message but my drive is still there?

Have I lost all data on that disk?

Should I just throw it in the garbage or is it still salvagable?

Thanks
 
Just because you get a SMART message, doesn't necessarily follow that the drive is complete toast. It's a warning to get out there and something quick!

It's possible that software like GetDatBack or Easy Recovery Pro might be able to recover data from that drive, but not guaranteed. These progs aren't free though...

ROGER - G0AOZ.
 


Thank Roger,


Actually something REALLY strange happen last night, I was waiting for a reply before posting.

I was watching an X-File episode with BS player. There is a function that allowo to take screenshots and I set the player to dump those screenshots in a folder on that drive. Si I was watching the episode and making screenshot as usual when I realised that the player was doing it's job and was not giving me an error message which is surely odd considering that the drive is not supoosed to be there.

I opened windows explorer to find that the entire drive was now back but the volume name is still "local drive".

If I look into the disk manager it even has the correct volume name which is "music/film".

It seems that taking screenshots triggered the drive back to life :)

I haven't rebooted yet so I don't know if s.m.a.r.t will give me the same error message again.

Does anybody has any idea how can this be possible.

Thanks
 
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