Western Digital has lost it's partition

[maxserg]

I have a WD Caviar 180 GIG on a ATA PCI 133 card. Now it doesn't want to show itself. I have a message when I restart the machine:"Unreadable disk do you want to eject, ignore or initialize". For shure I check Ignore button. Seems that it has lost its partition, maybe the heat's fault. Should-I put it in the freezer then put it back and try to recover it?

I've bought Disk Warrior with no help at all, it doesn't see the hardware. I'm trying with drive saver but the scan is not complete.

Any suggestion

Most of the disk content is PT or DP sesssions or audio files(aiff, wav, SDII)

Thanks

[maxserg]

Nobody have had this problem?

[minister]

i have had nothing but trouble with WD...

does the drive have a switch on it? if so, do this:

turn off drive, restart computer, launch Disk Warrior, turn on drive... this should find it. then rebuild.

if that doesn't work, leave the drive on, and reboot from the DW CD...then see if the drive shows up. and while you are there, run it on your system.

if none of the above work, dust off your 2" machine and start from scratch.

[1m1]

If it has truly lost its partition map, I don't think DW will fix it. For that problem, the progam that I've had success with is Data Rescue II. I completely recovered the contents of two drives that way. And for what it's worth, I've had a good success rate with WD drives. I have a lot of them.

[Mubeau]

Oh god, this is always hard and serious!

Sometimes I had luck, removing this from the computer and plug it onto another
ATA controler or firewire case and start first "disk utiliy" and then the drive.

BUT BETTER: if data is important and/or if you worked longer than some days for it....:

!!!! LEAVE IT AS IT IS !!!!!!

And bring it to a data PROFESSIONAL recovery service.
They know best.
Because: IF it´s really the master record, then it will be easy to recover the whole thing
(and not even too expensive)....

Disk warrior wont make it worse, but you never know.
NEVER THINK ABOUT NORTON UTILITIES, btw!

BTW (wont help you, though): Always do LOW LEVEL FORMAT (writing zeros to disk!) when you buy a
new disk. Disk are getting worse )))

cheers,
Mubeau

[studiojimi]

just reformat and bounce your backup over to it

oh no backup?
PINKBELLY this guy!

[Seeee]

backs all this backup nonsense I hear about?

LOL.

yeah, i have eaten a few years of work because of drives doing that exact same thing.

consolidate, export, backup.

[1m1]

BUT BETTER: if data is important and/or if you worked longer than some days for it....:

!!!! LEAVE IT AS IT IS !!!!!!

And bring it to a data PROFESSIONAL recovery service.

One thing about Data Rescue II is that it doesn't try to change anything on the original drive, only copy from it to a different drive.

[maxserg]

I have to buy an new drive, maybe external FW and use Data Rescue II to copy the whole thing. I've tried the demo it seems to see everything but files (audio files) are mostly not playable but maybe theese were already deleted files from this drive (when it was healty) I have to go further.

By the way I guess that the failure happened because the eccess of heat, my air conditionning wasn't working for 3 weeks.

Maybe I should try freeze(put in the freezer) the hard drive and put it back in the computer and try to read any partition(if any...)

If it doesn't work, I could at least call it cold turkey