Disaster: Windows 7 unable to boot - logical drives missing !!

Something totally wierd and shocking happened with my machine running on Windows 7 today (25-06-10).

This is what happened, everything was working fine till the evening. I was back home from a hard day, started my machine and i saw a message that windows has updates that needs to be downloaded. I check the required updates, there were couple of .net framework and few windows kb series. i assumed them to be normal critical updates and as usual i updated my windows 7.

After successful update windows rebooted and something weird happened. i have 4 drives, 1 primary C: and 3 logical (D,E,F). All of a sudden drives D,E,F were unaccessible. It gave Data Error: Cyclic redundancy <<something>> . And when i tried to right-click and open it, it asked me to format the drive. i thought it could have been something with the update. So i restored backed to my restore point created before the update. After restore the drives were still unaccessible, except the C: i was able to access the C:

I started disk management to see the state of the drives. Surprisingly all the 3 drives showed RAW healthy state. I was shocked as i had all my critical data in those drives. i tried running chkdsk from command prompt on these drives, but it gave the same error.

I then tried putting in the startup disk to boot from cd and check if my data was still there, i rebooted by booting from the startup disk. The screen freezed on a black screen. i removed the cd and rebooted my machine. This time it gave me an options stating start windows normally or repair. I tried to start windows normally, but it failed and just rebooted again. This continued several times. I then went on the option to repair. The repair process just stucked on attempting repair. I rebooted and tried to install windows again. But it said windows cannot be installed on the drive and showed me an unsed 239 GB drive which is my HDD (250GB). Where did my logical drives and the data in it go


i tried the following options from recovery disk i.e running the following commands from the prompt.:
BOOTREC /FIXMBR
BOOTREC /FIXBOOT
BOOTREC /REBUILDBCD
BOOTREC /SCANOS

but all the commands gave a same error "A device attached to the system is not functioning"

i just dont know what to do now ?? All my 12 years career data is in that drive !!

To add to the pain, my external backup drive has been sent to the vendor for RMA, since it had accidentally fallen from my hand and drive was thus unaccessible.

Please help me start my system and retrieve my data

If your data recovery requirement is so critical you need to get your drive looked at by a competent software engineer - you don't find many of them down the corner shop and they are not usually cheap. A cyclic redundancy check failure does not bode well and the recovery efforts you have made will not have helped but most of your data should still be recoverable with the right person using the right tools. I have recovered data in the past from a drive which was "invisible" to Windows so it can be done - depends how important it is to you but please avoid using recovery "wizards" and "Dr DOS" from down the street!

You could boot to an Ubuntu live CD and see if it recognizes the drive, and if so copy the data over to another drive. Dont run any tools in Ubuntu on the drive, just see if it will recognize the drive and if so you will be able to copy data to another drive.

Are all of these partitions on the same physical hard drive?

What utility did you use to set up the logical drives?

I would agree with using a partition managment utility to boot and look at the drive from outside windows would be a good idea. Maybe the partitions could be recovered. I like Partition Wizard which you can download the bootable version and burn, then use to boot your system and check the drives. It does have a partition recovery utility.

If all else fails, you may be able to freeze the drive in your freezer then as quickly as possible, reattach it to your system and clone to another drive.

This will probably work.

If you try this, have Clonezilla live ready to boot to on cd and your system ready to boot to the cd...along with a new drive ready to write to.

If it's extremely important you recover the data and money is no object, you can find professional services that will do this as already stated.

What may be best to try first though is Gibson's Spinrite. It works wonders.

I would still advise great caution - wizards are all very well in situations where media is reliable but where it has been shown to be unsafe (especially in reporting CRC errors) the best guess approach of recovery wizards can do more harm than good and further reduce the chances of recovery. The OP has indicated that the files are of significant value and I would still advise examination of the drives under the greater control of an experienced software engineer.

Originally Posted by patcooke

I would still advise great caution - wizards are all very well in situations where media is reliable but where it has been shown to be unsafe (especially in reporting CRC errors) the best guess approach of recovery wizards can do more harm than good and further reduce the chances of recovery. The OP has indicated that the files are of significant value and I would still advise examination of the drives under the greater control of an experienced software engineer.

Agreed. Be very careful with these recovery programs, you stand a high chance of losing data.

Your best bet is to boot to a linux live cd (ubuntu) and see if you can access your hdd like that. and if you can, you will be able to move your data to another hdd from there.

By doing this you will also be able to tell if this is an error on windows part or if the actual drive is having errors, since it was working fine until you did updates.

-Brad

well guys, this is for updating on my issue.

I tried connecting to my friends xp machine. The drives were not detected, neither in explorer nor device management. I tried again on another friends machine running windows 7, surprisingly my HDD got detected but complete 250GB as raw data. He was a techie so tried a tool called partition doctor, which tried to rebuild my devices partition table.

We were successful, but enough. I was able to recover my C and D but E and F were still showing as RAW data. Finally, we gave up and sent the HDD to a professional data recovery fellow at Lamington Road (Esskay Computers). HE has quoted 3700 for the entire disk recovery, to which i have mentioned to take recovery of drives E and F only. He will be reverting with further quote in a couple of days.

Alternatively i also checked with samsung guys (my HDD is samsung 250 GB) and they said my device is under warrenty untill 2012. So i guess i might as well have it replaced.