So you might think “Ok, sounds you don’t have a problem”, lol.
But before I go put back all the stuff I had to buy a 100 buck program to get them off safely I would like to know what caused this problem.
In disk management the health of the disk was given as “healthy”. I just couldn’t access it.
So I bought that program (Disk Drill, quite an investment, but since I had almost 1T of data on it, collected over way too many years, well worth it and that managed to find all the data and copy it to my internal HD that was luckily just big enough.
And then I thought let’s see if it wants to format. Probably not, but let’s just try it.
And to my amazement it formatted, and now I can access it again. And I tried copying stuff to it and that worked too.
So my question is, what can cause a HD to just lose the accessibility BUT be formattable and usable after that?
I’m using windows 11, have a brand new computer (put together last November), msi motherboard B550M-PRO-VDH-WIFI.
The Elements Drive is also from November.
I would highly recommend you invest in another hard drive (or two) to keep a backup of your important data.
Software Data Recovery is great and all, but if anything happens to the hard drive physically eg. dropped, power surge, lightning strike, plugging in the wrong power adaptor, physical bad sectors etc
Then, software data recovery will not be able to help recover your data.
If you ever need a Hardware data recovery service … you’re looking at hundreds of $$$
To answer your question, no-one will be able to give you an exact answer … the problem could have been caused by a number of things (improper use, not safely ejecting, virus, malware etc) … but it sounds like the hard drive partition table got corrupted.
This will not render the drive “unformattable” … quite the opposite, re-formatting the partition table will fix the corruption.
If a hard drive is not able to be formatted … then there is something severely wrong with it.
A corrupted partition table is not classed as “severe” hard drive problem … it’s only “severe” if you don’t have backup(s) of your years of data that’s on it.
Thanks for the reply. Backup disk is definitely on the program now!
About the cause, I was doing nothing to the disk, I was listening to music (stored on the disk) when it suddenly stopped and when I looked I couldn’t access the disk anymore. No virus or malware, no power surge, didn’t drop it.
Also, when I looked at disk management the disk was categorized as “healthy” and it looks exactly the same in there now as it did then. From what I can find about the corrupted partition table the health of the drive would not be okay.
It does sound like I need to send it back and apply for the warranty, because I am not gonna trust my data to a disk that can lose its partition table just like that…
