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Suddenly Drive appears as unformatted


jgt1942

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I've had this issue at least 6 times in the last year where suddenly a drive (different drives, different USB enclosures and some were connected directly to the MB)  that has been working for weeks to months will suddenly appear as a new unformatted drive. Just yesterday it occurred on one of my backup drives (WD 6TB Black) and there are a few folders I'd like to recover (the rest I can easily recreate) and I have a few questions. The drive is currently in a Thermaltake USB 3 enclosure and I have not done anything to it since the issue occurred. When this occurred with the previous drives I suspected that the drive was at fault and I ran numerous different test and all reported that the drive was OK and no problems were found.

 

Following is some additional info.

  • I'm running a clean install of Win10 and about 1/2 completed with the entire process. So far this has been the worst windows installation I have every attempted in the past 30 years. I have encountered numerous issues that have taken days to weeks to resolve. Also some of the new default settings have created issues for me and again a lot of time to resolve.
  • I have a total 11 hard drives on this system of which a SSD is my boot drive. Some of the drives are directly connected to the MB and others are in USB enclosures. The drives are about 40% data and 60% backup.
  • Yesterday when I detected the issue I opened Computer Management and then Disk Management. At that time windows informed me I had a new drive attached I elected to just do nothing at the time. Now when I go into Disk Management I do not get the message and I do not see the unformatted drive. I just turned off and back on the USB enclosure, I still do not see the drive. BTW I could attach the USB enclosure to another system.

Now for some questions

  1. I have Recuva Pro v1.52.1086, to recover the folders I'm interested in - do I first format the drive and then have Recuva process the drive? If this is not the correct action please let me know what I should do. 
  2. The really big question is, why did I lose the drive and it now appears as unformatted?
  3. Any suggestions as to how I can prevent this in the future?
  4. Is there any additional information I can provide to help with the issue?
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