HDD failed to reformat, disappeared except for in BIOS

Earlier today I attempted to transfer some data from one HDD to another. At exactly 78% of the way through, it gave me an error, "the destination you have specified does not exist". Then the drive disappeared from This PC. Also, would not show in disk management or disk part. Upon rebooting, the disk reappeared. I tried to transfer the data two more times but the same thing happened.

I noticed a notification in the action center from Intel Rapid Storage stating that a drive had be disconnected.

I proceeded to backup all the data on the drive that was acting up.

Then I attempted to reformat it. It gave me an error, could not reformat. The drive disappeared again.

I rebooted the machine and tried to reformat again but this time selected quick format. It gave me the same error. The drive disappeared for good this time. It does not show up anywhere except for in the BIOS. I also tried booting into linux to see if it showed up in Gparted, it does not. I tried rebooting multiple times and ran chkdsk. No progress.

My assumption is hardware failure. This drive was giving me some minor issues in the near past. I attempted to transfer files to my android phone which came me some issues. Computer froze a couple of times.

Are there any steps I can take to try and recover this drive. It's not that old. Thanks in advance for your help.

dalchina said:

Hi, you appear to have a laptop with 1 SSD. Presumably the HDD is a USB external drive, unless you're talking about a completely different PC.

It's therefore unclear at this point what cables or hardware might be involved, and could potentially be substituted.

Useful tools:
Hard Disk Sentinel (trial) - the best I know to give a quick and appropriate analysis via its GUI.
- if the disk is at all accessible.
Minitool Partition Wizard (free).


- this + an assumption the disk is external suggest possible USB problems.

Have you tried using different USB sockets/cables?

Hi, I have multiple machines. This computer is a desktop that I built myself. It has been running smoothly for about a year. The drive in question is an internal 3TB Toshiba 3.5" HDD. It's connected via SATA cable.

I just rebooted my computer and the drive is showing up again.

I will try using the tools that you recommended. Thanks.

Try a different SATA cable and different SATA port. Might also want to move the power connection to a different string of the power supply if available.

Okay, I will try swapping cables/ports and will report back.

I borrowed the SATA cable from my other drive. Swapped ports. No improvement.....

I tried reformating with another file type just to experiment. In Gparted it let me format to fat32. I tried to run chkdsk but it gave me an error stating it can not be used with a raw file system.

The drive consistently appears now when I boot into either Windows 10 or linux. I was able to run Disk Part, list disk, select disk, and then clean. I then initialized it in diskmgmt.msc. Tried to reformat it in ntfs but it failed.

Might try a low level format utility if available from the manufacturer.

NavyLCDR said:

Might try a low level format utility if available from the manufacturer.

Would something like Dban work?

I doubt that DBAN will help. It sounds to me like track 0 on the drive has gone bad.

[How-to guide] Track 0 bad repair and data recovery - EaseUS