V01 Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 My laptop has decided to **** about. The primary hard drive is an SSD, I also have a SATA drive for videos and pictures etc. This has worked fine up until today where for some reason it has stopped recognising my secondary HDD.Thinking it was just an unassigned drive letter I've gone into disk management and noticed it is set as the recovery partition, due to this I can't assign a drive letter. Am I ****?I tried going into DiskPart from the run menu and noticed it is also set as hidden, I'm guessing this is all linked to being set as the recovery partition. I've done a quick google and have been getting back advice to do what I have already tried, and run a few commands in diskpart to clear hidden attribute from the volume. Is there anything else I can do, I upgraded to Windows 10 in July surely it should already have a recovery partition? I have photo's of the nipper on this disk drive, I'd prefer not to lose them, Pretty sure most of them are backed up elsewhere but some definitely are not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Davkaus Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 Before you do anything else, if it has data you don't want to use, I'd use something like Clonezilla to clone the hard drive, and try to retrieve your data from the clone first. I've never seen a recovery partition as a separate disk, can you screenshot the disk management utility? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V01 Posted October 30, 2015 Author Share Posted October 30, 2015 (edited) The one at the top without a letter Edited October 30, 2015 by V01 words Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Davkaus Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 (edited) That isn't your second HDD, the recovery partition is on your first disk. Notice that they both show up as on Disk 0, it's the same physical disk. This is just a random example from Google to demonstrate, but this is how it displays if you have multiple physical disks it's most likely that your disk has either lost its physical connection, or it's knackered. Just to be sure, when you first boot the PC up, does it list the disks? If not, can you boot in to bios and see if the disk is listed there? It's a long shot, but it just proves it isn't a software problem. Edited October 30, 2015 by Davkaus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V01 Posted October 30, 2015 Author Share Posted October 30, 2015 Listed as hidden in bios and recovery in disk management. In a remote assistance session with Microsoft support, I'm guessing they will be finished soon saying there's nothing wrong with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Davkaus Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 (edited) It's not listed as recovery in disk management, you'd see a second row in the bottom half of the screen if Windows could detect a second disk. That's a partition of your first drive. It's only 461MB! Edited October 30, 2015 by Davkaus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PompeyVillan Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 Yeah, what Davacus said. It looks like what you are seeing there are all partitions of your primary HDD. If it's just suddenly disappeared without you changing anything there's a chance the drive has failed, happened to my laptop this summer. Just stopped working. I would suggest opening up the computer and reseating the drive first. Could have simply shaken loose. Then boot, access BIOS settings and see if you can see drive in there. Try this a few times.You can get a USB to SATA cable (can be bought for a few quid) and trying in your laptop that our just plug it directly into another computer to verify that is not something odd with your SATA connection, which is quite unlikely. If you still fail to see the drive...hmm...I there are disk recovery tools on Hirens boot cd. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V01 Posted October 30, 2015 Author Share Posted October 30, 2015 Good news bad news situation. The drive had become unseated, sorted that and all good right. Nope. BOOTMGR is missing press ctrl+alt+del to restart. Cock waffle from Microsoft support decked around with my partition and I didn't double check that everything was OK before I turned off. The real kicker is it looks like I need boot disc to do anything about it and I'm at work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Davkaus Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 BOOTMGR shouldn't even know about your second drive, your PC should boot with it completely disconnected. There's a chance you've knocked loose your primary drive when reseating the second disk,. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V01 Posted October 30, 2015 Author Share Posted October 30, 2015 Checked that, the support guy was dicking around with the ssd partition. I've assumed he ballsed something up and I need to use the boot disc I have at home. Is it wrong I'm considering going home to get it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PompeyVillan Posted October 31, 2015 Share Posted October 31, 2015 First thing to try, access BIOS settings, check that you are booting from your SSD. If not change boot order so SSD is first boot device. If this doesn't help then you need repair or installation disk, as long as everything is connected properly. Not difficult to fix though. Microsoft tech probably changed your active partition , the partition your comp is told to try and boot the OS from. There is no OS, hence the bootmgr message. Insert disk, go to repair, then command prompt. Type:bootrec /fixbootThen restart your comp. To be fair, IIRC there might be a 'try to fix automatically' option in Windows Recovery Environment that might do the trick. And I should imagine you will want to back up your photos when you're back in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V01 Posted October 31, 2015 Author Share Posted October 31, 2015 Had to sneak home for my recovery disk.Automatic repair didn't work so I used command prompt, it worked eventually. 2 lessons learned.always check for a physical issue before you start dicking around with software fixes.keep your bootdisc close to your laptop. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PompeyVillan Posted October 31, 2015 Share Posted October 31, 2015 Third lesson. Keep backups of important files!Just out of interest, you had remote assistance from a Microsoft tech, and they didn't know what the problem was? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V01 Posted October 31, 2015 Author Share Posted October 31, 2015 Pretty much, clearly I didn't explain my problem in the same way it is written in their flowchart. After an hour having seen the replies on here and realising how dumb I was, I told them it was a physical problem and they asked if I had a second HDD. 4th lesson.Don't use remote assistance Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
limpid Posted October 31, 2015 Administrator Share Posted October 31, 2015 5th lesson.Don't replace the hard drive. Pick two online storage providers and keep your stuff on those. Dropbox, Google Drive, Copy, Box, or host your own with ownCloud. Dropbox (at least) gives you version control so even if you get CryptoLocker you can just recover the previous versions of your stuff without paying a ransom. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V01 Posted October 31, 2015 Author Share Posted October 31, 2015 Most of my stuff is on dropbox, in the process of saving 10k photos into google drive (most of them are on dropbox, just doing it for redundancy) The drive itself is fine, with my laptop sitting in my bag on the way to and from work it just slid off the connection. I panicked and massively overreacted rather than calming down and doing a simple check. lesson learned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PompeyVillan Posted October 31, 2015 Share Posted October 31, 2015 Pretty much, clearly I didn't explain my problem in the same way it is written in their flowchart. After an hour having seen the replies on here and realising how dumb I was, I told them it was a physical problem and they asked if I had a second HDD. 4th lesson.Don't use remote assistanceWhat I find concerning is that the MS tech changed your active partition or didn't notice that you had which led to the boot error message. I hope you didn't have to pay for that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Davkaus Posted October 31, 2015 Share Posted October 31, 2015 Microsoft's business support is incredible, but the consumer support is a shambles. All I'm saying is you should have listened to my second post instead of going to Microsoft. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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