Internal HDD not showing in Explorer, shows in DiskMgmt as Unallocated

goani · 17 Aug 2018

Booted up from sleep this morning after using the PC fine last night, only to discover that my partition of one of my Seagate drives had vanished from Explorer.

Checked Disk Management and it is showing up in there and registers as 'Online' however all the space is now marked as 'Unallocated'
Shows up on BIOS boot fine so it's connected and can be seen. Also doesn't show up normally in Safe Mode.

It's a 2TB HDD, so will likely take hours to scan using recovery software.
Anything I can do or are my files gone?

dalchina · 17 Aug 2018

Do you have a disk image of it? We constantly urge people to use disk imaging routinely, which even protects their data and Windows in the event of disk failure. E.g. Macrium Reflect (free). Much faster recovery than via technical help.

Basics: check the disk- e.g. Hard Disk Sentinel (trial) or HD Tune e.g. - smart params and error scan.

Try using e.g. Minitool Partition Wizard (free) and try the partition recovery tool. The scan will show you if there's anything recoverable without making changes, quicker than trying file by file recovery if it helps.