2nd HDD lost partition

[npanne]

Please Help - tearing out my hair here!

Have recently got a new PC (Lenovo desktop, with i5 Core processor), complete with Windows8, and the only thing I've added to the machine is my 2nd SATA HDD which acted as a media storage drive in my old PC and was to do the same in this. It took me a while to get Windows to recognise the drive, but in the end it did, and I was able to read / write to is as expected.

I then had some fairly catastrophic problems with the PC following a failed Windows update install, which resulted in repeated crashed boot attempts and system restores, but eventually came back - however this time the second HDD is not showing in Explorer. It was showing in the disk management tool, but did not have any available options (all greyed out), so I couldn't assign it a volume - then it disappeared from here, and in the end I powered down, disconnected the power and SATA cables and did a boot / boot down cycle before reconnecting and rebooting - now it shows in the lower section of the disk management tool, but I don't know how (or if) a partition can be restored from here to retrieve the data - any ideas? Has this (seemingly jinxed) PC eaten all of my media files?

 

[CountMike]

In your place, I would connect that HDD to some other computer and from there, using a tool like Easus Data Recovery Wizard, backup all the important files from it. After that, kill the whole partition, erase it and make a new one properly formatted. That would be safest method. Trying further like this could just corrupt it's data or write over and then it might be impossible to get anything back.

 

[npanne]

Thanks for the reply Mike - I just tried this, and Easeus could not recover anything from the disk - it seems that something has done a proper job on it - it's not catastrophic as I back-up to an external drive on a semi-regular basis, and haven't saved much since the last back-up - just annoying more than anything. Am trying a few more things, and if anything returns any success then I'll report back - this really has been a duffer of a machine - hard to know whether to blame the hardware or software at this stage, but expect better from something that is only two months old - even if it was low-end price (sub $800).