HDD suddenly not initialized. All tools say its good!

[DonS]

Seems my week for the odd issues.

I have a client who brought in a desktop computer. It was no reading a boot device.

I pulled the drive and USB Docked it. The drive can be seen but it shows as "Unknown - Not Initialized - Unallocated".. So I figured bum drive.

But I have tested it with Crystal Disk, Seagate Tools, HD Tune and it has passed all tests!! So the drive seems like its good. Does anyone have any thoughts why it would just do what it did and, even more important, any suggestions if it is possible at this point to recover it back working order?

I am going to run partition recovery tools on it in the mean time...

Thank you in advance!

 

[Sky-Knight]

There is an open source utility called testdisk, that might be able to restore the damaged partition table. I see your location is Phoenix, this is actually a common problem out here in our neck of the woods. The power does something crazy during a storm and splat goes the partition table. The files are still there, the drive just cannot read the partitions. If you're lucky, the backup partition table is intact, and a simple restore will fix it. If you're not, testdisk might be able to rebuild it, if it cannot it can perform a recovery scan and get at the files and restore them to another disk.

 

[TechPJC]

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

 

[Markverhyden]

I've had several of these types of problems and test disk was able to recover the partition. But remember to make a complete drive image first of the patient.

 

[Krynn72]

Could it be encrypted? I think it would still initialize though.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Encrypted drives will read as encrypted, they won't see a partition table but drive manager will report the encrypted status.

 

[sapphirescales]

Try to mount it in Linux or Mac OS.

 

[fencepost]

Hah, the last lost/corrupted partition table I remember having to deal with was in the days of IDE.

Protip: Never connect 2 drives both set to master, particularly not when one of them is the drive you pulled from a laptop so you could image it for a migration.

 

[lcoughey]

Did you fully clone the drive? My experience in the past is that techs tend to run short tests and assume that the drive is healthy, yet they didn't actually test every sector.

If you can easily clone the drive, without a single read error, are you able to easily access the file system with a data recovery program like R-Studio?

I've never seen the situation you describe without one or more of the following reasons:

1. Someone deleted the partitions (can't easily do with the boot drive)
2. There is media damage and/or weak heads
3. The drive is encrypted or has a USB bridge that converts 512K to 4M sectors
4. A virus has encrypted or altered the sectors
5. Someone is trying to access a drive formatted in a file system not recognized by the OS (ie, HFS+ in Windows)

 

[DonS]

Thank you all for your replies.

I ran a full test with seagate tools and the drive passed. I attempted to recover the partitions with tools that have worked for me previously with no luck.

Upon chatting with the client, it ended up that this was his son's computer that he used to play games on with no real data of importance stored on it. So we just moved forward with a new hard drive and installation.