A friend of mine has a problem with a HD

[Laird]

"
currently have four hard drives in my computer.


The one I am concerned about is the E: drive. As you can see, it's a 233GB capacity drive with 36GB free. However, when I go into that drive, the only folder visible is an old trial of 3D Studio Max.


he files in this directory work fine (there are html and image files I can open and view). But I had, literally hundreds, if not thousands, of files on this drive.

I attempted to run Check Disk via XP, however, about 75% of the way through it errors out.



Does anyone have any idea what could have happened to these files?

The last time I accessed this drive was maybe two weeks ago and there weren't any problems. I haven't done much since then, with the expception of installing Visual Studio .NET 2003, NOD32 antivirus (it has protection against the new wmf exploit), and upgrading my .NET framework to 2.0.

I really don't think any of those would have caused this. NOD32 did actually find some trojans buried in my registry, but those were on the C: drive, nothing was found on the E: drive. I had avast! before and it never detected them. I also don't think that a virus would delete every folder but one in a hard drive.

I keep my computer pretty clean, I use Internet Explorer for IE Only pages I trust (like Windows Update), I keep the firewall going, and I've never really had a huge problem with any PCs I've had.

I also ran chkdsk in DOS mode.


The drive is only about a year old, it's an SATA, Maxtor I think. The drive still recognizes that there's about 200GB of data on there, it's just not showing it. Does anyone have any ideas?"

I already told him to do the standard stuff, I was hoping someone will have an idea on what can be done other then "Put a bullet it into it."

[Dave]

I'm not an expert in any way, shape or form.

But it does look like the drive has been or should be shot.

I have heard that there are companies (perhaps even the company you bought it from) that will attempt to recover data on the HD for around $100. (If you value the data that much.)

Anyway, Good Luck. You'll need it.

[Pezzoni]

Looks like it's going bad I'm afraid.
Get everything you can off it now, and then, depending on how much you value the data on it, pay for it to be recovered, or have a stab at it yourself.
You'll have better chances if you don't try and write to / defragment the drive, so leave that side of things well alone.

Alternatively, shop yourself as a terrorist to the police, format the drive, and ask for a copy of the data after they've done a recovery (assuming you aren't locked up).

[Pu-239]

Running the harddrive if it's damaged increases the possibility of data loss...