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Drive say need formatted

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jordn23

Technical User
Aug 14, 2003
2
US
I need some help before I mess something up. My computer has been acting crazy for the past few days (5 or 6). I turned off my computer one day and the next when I rebooted, everything in my F drive is gone. I have basic knowledge of computers, and I installed another hard drive a year ago and everything was fine. My c drive is my original I have my cd burned as d, my dvd burner as e and my other hard drive as f. I never cleared the drive, so how come it says that it needs to be formatted. I have a lot of material on that drive and really need some help.

 
These days many drives (but certainly not all) can fail after a year or so. That's probably your problem in this case, but you ought to test it to be sure. If it's bad and still under warranty, contact the manufacturer or vendor. I hope you have a back-up (or several backups) of important files.

Why do you think the warranties for standard drives dropped to one year? (Not becuase they're so good a 3 year warranty isn't needed, as some manufacturers claimed.) Of course if you pay a little extra for the premium drives they can have a 3 or 5 year warranty.

Western Digital and Maxtor/Quantum have test and repair utilities to download for their drives that will overwrite the entire drive with zeros. I also downloaded one from Seagate, but although it will test almost any drive regardless of manufacturer (unlike the others) it does not wipe the data.

 
If you can't get it to work. You might go ahead and try formatting it. There are a number of unformat utilities that you can then use to get the information back. Obviously do this before you start writing data back on teh drive. Maybe check out downloads-zdnet.com for an unformatter and/or a utility that can check the drive for you.

Good luck!
 
Thanks for the input all. Fortunately, I reinstalled Win 2k an everything on my drive came back. I quickly backed everything up so that if it happens again I won't feel like suck a dumba#! for not having my system backed up. Again thanks for the input.

Raul
 
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