When I went to bed one night my computer was running fine. The next morning the screen was black and when I restarted it a message something like this appeared, "No Boot File, Insert Installation Disk and hit Enter." I couldn't get the computer to boot up so I switched to my slave drive and installed my XP OS on that and made the original drive the slave drive. No D: drive showed up on Windows Explorer. Why doesn't the drive show up anymore and what caused it to disappear overnight? Is there any way to "see the drive again so that I can at least retrieve my files". I did have a Clone Backup of the main drive up until the night the drive crapped out but of course I reformatted the clone drive that night before I went to bed because I intended to make a new clone backup the next day. What are the odds that the main drive waits for months to die the same night I delete the backup, huh. It's like the machines are laughing at us. Any help would be appreciated.

hard disks can fail at any time without warning -You should download the diagnostic software supplied by the drive manufacturer to ascertain if this is the case. The software runs on it's own basic operating system from a bootable floppy or cd. All the major disk manufacturers provide the free software, but you must only use the one that's supplied by your disk manufacturer as they are not 'generic' for any make of disk.

I did manage to find an emergency recovery floppy last night that I had made not long ago when I installed a partition utility. The recovery floppy give me the option to repair the MBR which I did and now everything is back to normal. I still would like to know what happened to cause the drive's MBR to get corrupted. Losing that drive without warning was pretty scary especially since my backup was gone too.

Hard to say what caused it.... powerfailure, powersurge, dying hard drive, bad memory, improper shutdown, virus....

Oh and you should probably make a new backup.... if you don't you are just asking for trouble.... take this as a warning and be thankful you find out this way that you need to back up instead of having a dead hard drive....

This post has been edited by shard92: Nov 4 2008, 02:36 PM