Hard Disk Problem

[Rambo742]

Hi there

I recently bought a 250gb WD Caviar SE HDD for storing loads of big files, I installed the disk, set it as slave, formatted, copied files to it, and all was well!
When I looked this morning the drive (:F) had disappeared from explorer and my shortcuts to folders on the drive stopped working.
The thing is however, the drive is recognised in the BIOS and device manager and is said to be working properly.
I ended up looking at disk management and the drive is present but shown as Offline, also when I right click the icon and click Reactivate I get an error message.
I hope the disk contents arent corrupt as I had loads of files on there

Anyway thanks in advance
Tom

[Play_The_0dds]

unless your jumper settings are causing problems, (try not to use cable select, newer motherboards like master/slave, master of a single, or the specific role). if you set it to cable select it may work for a while, or when it feels like it. to me it sounds more like a drive going bad. check the jumpers first. also the ribbon cable could be bad or the wrong cable.
usually when i see problems like this from western digital drives they are bad. you should be able to get a rma if the drive is not that old. i dont use wd drives anymore because you just can not depend on them.

[Rambo742]

Thanks for the reply,
The drive is less than a week old.
I've tried many jumper settings and different ribbon cables with no luck, but what I have just done is in disk management, I chose to convert the disk to basic then back to dynamic allowing me to format it.
It is currently formatting and although I've lost many files (some irreplaceable), hopefully the drive is not dead.
I will now keep backups and not rely on these drives!

Thanks again

[Rambo742]

ok now the drive seems fine but empty, however i'm just trying out file recovery software that seems to be doing the trick! hope i dont go through this hassle again

[almazlamaz]

so u learn easy lessons in hard way,
ALWAYS MAKE BACKUP