First off, you don't specify your operating system.
But IIRC, Windows NTFS operating systems from Win2K through Server2003 have a known problem with the disk management snap-in when dealing with a large number of partitions. Logical Disk Manager (LDM) fails to mount the file system or assign a drive letter. And there is a known problem with partitions disappearing when running Vista and XP dual-boot.
I'm uncertain if either of these apply. Otherwise, I haven't yet found anything I can feel is definitely specific to your problem. But I have to ask: Why so many partitions?
I know several very competent computer techs, among whom there are essentially two opinions on partitioning:
1) One group feels each separate drive should be a single partition on each physical drive, and having multiple partitions is asking for trouble.
2) The other group feels two or three partitions are okay, there being advantages to having the OS on one partition, and fixed-size swap file and data on the second. The OS partition does not fragment as quickly, and can be defragmented faster, so long as it is not too full. So you size the OS partition accordingly.
I'm in the second group, though I'm not an expert. Since it takes me quite a while to do a clean install and set up all my programs, not to mention all settings and configurations, I typically divide a drive in two, an OS partition of about 40G, and a data partition. 40g is ample for my purposes. Then I clone several other drives exactly the same way. Bootable clones. A couple are stored, the rest go into the computer as data storage drives. (Video editing involves very large files, and I use my drives hard, losing one, maybe two a year typically). 40G isn't much to lose with today's drives, and I can boot off any of them if there's a problem. I do this in preference to a RAID array, and have never had trouble with partitions.
Personally, I'd start over with a full format and fewer partitions. And monitor the S.M.A.R.T. status (health) of the drive with something like SpeedFan.
Dunno if all that helped you any.
There is always the possibility, as you say, that the problem could be hardware, i.e. the drive could be failing. Good luck.
NTFS Crash
Linear Mode
