Help Fuck... Location is not available...

[Ctuchik]

So i restarted my computer earlier after installing a driver to my PCI sound card. didnt notice anything until i wanted to play a game that was on my secondary hard drive when i got a popup saying:

Location is not available

D\: is not accessible

The disc struckture is corrupted or unreadable


how the fuck did that happen? i used that hard drive just minutes before installing that driver....

and can it be fixed?

/edit: yes i have uninstalled the driver to no avail.

/edit 2: windows aparently cant find anything wrong with it either. its listed in the "computer" tab and is also working properly when i examine it in device manager. i just cant access the fucking thing.

/edit 3: aparently something about that drive is "offline".... ?????!?!? >.<

 

[nath]

Eep, have you tried system restore?

 

[Ctuchik]

i'l try that now. still wanna know wtf happened tho :/

 

[Ch3tan]

can you run chkdsk or scandisk on it?

 

[Ctuchik]

cant find scandisk on win7 lol....

chkdsk i'm not sure how to use. opened in in the dosprompt and its running. but i dont know if its scanning D\:

but its not listed in disk defrag.

ah, found it out. says corrupt master file table. windows will attempt to recover master file table from disc.

/edit: btw, system restore didnt help.

/edit2: anyone have any experience with any of these programs? http://www.ntfs.com/quest14.htm

 

[Ctuchik]

aw maaaan....

used "chkdsk D: /f /r" and the bloody thing wants to format :/ i dont wanna format! i have way to much important shit on there

 

[nath]

Ubuntu Home Page | Ubuntu
Get yourself a live CD from there and boot up with it. See if you can access your data through that.

 

[Ctuchik]

linux? no way. i have 0 experience with linux and i dont plan on screwing around with it.

i much rather have a program that just use windows.


i mean, there gotta be SOME free programs out there that fixes these things without a format.

 

[Malecheon]

From the brief google search I did, your disk is probably screwed, and your next option is data recovery.

For that you can try nath's suggestion of a linux boot cd, or google for some data recovery tools.

Out of interest, is your D: drive a physical disk, or just a partition ? If it's a physical drive, have you tried checking the cables and reseating them, on the off chance ?

 

[nath]

Dude, seriously - there's no messing around with linux, the live CD is a piece of piss, a granny can use it. You burn the iso, boot from it, select the language and get a very nice graphical interface to browse your files. What's more, it runs directly from the CD - doesn't install anything no fucking about at all.

 

[Ctuchik]

yes its a physical disk, and yes i've checked if the cables are attaches and they are.

so a format is the only option then?

 

[Malecheon]

If your D: drive is formatted as an NTFS partition as well, you could also have a look here and see if any of the steps help:

Error messages when you try to gain access to an NTFS volume

 

[Ctuchik]

Dude, seriously - there's no messing around with linux, the live CD is a piece of piss, a granny can use it. You burn the iso, boot from it, select the language and get a very nice graphical interface to browse your files. What's more, it runs directly from the CD - doesn't install anything no fucking about at all.

yes but i'm a technical retard when it comes to stuff like that. if theres even the slightest possibility for me to fuck things up i guarantee you that i will

i stay far far FAAAAAR away from manually messing around with anything important on my PC

i much rather have programs doing it for me

 

[nath]

I don't think you're getting how easy it is. It's not a technical thing, don't let "linux" put you off. It's basically a CD that you boot in to and it gives you a windows environment straight away. Then you can try and browse to your hard drive from the menus there. No command line shit, no faffing about just very easy.

I promise you it's worth a try - after you burn the disc and boot it the first option is "Try Ubuntu without making changes to my computer". That's what you want .

 

[Ctuchik]

If your D: drive is formatted as an NTFS partition as well, you could also have a look here and see if any of the steps help:

Error messages when you try to gain access to an NTFS volume

none of that really helped as it seems to be about master HDD's and i have a problem with a slave.

 

[Ctuchik]

found this TestDisk - CGSecurity

anyone wanna clue me in? i just get 3 options when i run it and neither actually give a hint what it will do.

first is create a logfile, second is append information to logfile and the last is don't record anything.

 

[nath]

Ubuntu would be so much easier than that .

 

[Ctuchik]

yes perhaps but *cough* i'm all out of dvd's to burn and noone to beg one from atm :<

but i honestly dont think that would help as the MFT actually is corrupted.

tho i did notice something when i poked around in the computer manager. the corrupted HD's file system is listed as RAW, now i KNOW that last time i looked it said NTFS....

edit: oh there is one more thing in the computer manager, i seem to have 50 odd gig of unallocated space on my primary that i'd LOVE to get my hands on, its always been like that but i've never bothered with it as space havent been all that much of an issue before now, but if i do manage to find a program that can recover some files i'd love to get all that space back

so how do i reallocate it? i cant find an option to do it.

 

[WPKenny]

For the partition get something like Norton PartitionMagic 8.0 - Partitioning Software - Disk Partition

For the drive recovery get something like NTFS Recovery - Unformat and Repair NTFS drive I've found their stuff pretty straight forward and easy to use. You can try it first to see if it can recover stuff, save the log file of what it can recover so if you decide to buy it you don't have to sit through the whole disc scanning process again.

 

[ramathorn]

Sucks when a drive dies dude...I can hook you up with a full version of Active Uneraser:

UNERASER. Data Recovery Software. Undelete Utility. Hard Drive Recovery.

I bought this like four years ago and it has never let me down when a drive has failed. Drop me a PM if you need

 

[Ctuchik]

well i ended up plucking it out and took it to a mate thats a techie at that shit, he had a sniff around with it on his PC and basically told me i'm fucked. the drive was aparently so corrupted he couldn't get more then 500 meg out of 170 gig of useful data out of it

i need to make backup copies more frequently, latest one is like a year old and completely useless :/

tho he couldn't explain why it happened just after i installed that sound driver. i'm fairly certain that had something to do with it but how i dont get. it wasn't even installed on that drive. and why wasn't windows affected at the same time then? >.<

owell, it seems to work good now after a format. was probably due one anyway i guess. havent done one since i bought the drive 4 years ago lol.

 

[Furr]

Probably heat, It's summer time and with ambient temps rising many a home pc see bits die, All my pc's have fans for the hard drive bays these days as they can get frighteningly hot.