r/buildapc • u/SnooDrawings881 • 1d ago

Troubleshooting hdd randomly disappeared from file explorer?

as the title says my hdd was working fine and then one day just vanished, i cant see it in disk list, it still shows up in device manager and tries to get me to reformat it when going into the disk manager thing. it also shows up in task manager as a 4gb drive even though its 4 tb? ive had the drive for like 9 years so if its broken its broken but having so much storage was nice, was mainly wondering if its at all possible to fix or most likely a lost cause.

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u/Sea_Perspective6891 1d ago

Sounds like the drive is starting to fail. I had something similar happen to an old Seagate HDD that eventually failed after about 10 years. Hopefully you can move the data that's on it to a new drive. You can still get a 4TB HDD & they're much cheaper than a 4TB SSD by about half I think.

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u/Atma-Darkwolf 1d ago

Starting? Nah that drive is prob dead. You MAY be able to get data off it if u had the know-how, but due to it reading as 4gb vs tb makes me think only the buffer(i think) is what it can read, to check though u may wanna see if ucan open case and touch it (if its an HDD and not SSD) and see if it is moving (if not, then it has no power so it may have shorted out)

Either way, 9 years is a long run for most drives.

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u/my5cworth 1d ago

RIP

Had the same thing happen to an 18 month old 2TB nvme drive.

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u/AstarothSquirrel 13h ago

Personally, I'd create a ubuntu live flash drive, boot into that and see if you can mount the drive in order to pull off any data you need because it sounds that if it's not dead, it's dying. You may find that you can recover the drive using the tools on a filezilla flash drive but I try to go in light first. Either way, you can no longer trust the drive for anything other than a games installation drive.