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Problem description: Last night my Win10 system rebooted itself out of sleep, possibly to install an update (not sure). I woke up to see the Win10 boot screen with the circle turning endlessly, no message. Hours later it was still doing the same thing. Reluctantly I did a hard reset; the same thing happened. Even more reluctantly I did a hard power off, waited a few minutes, then rebooted. Windows went into repair mode and, after doing a repair, rebooted and I was able to successfully get into normally functioning Windows. However, my 3TB (non-boot, mechanical) data drive is not mounted. (It has two partitions, one for data and one for less important/large apps.) Disk Management shows it but says I must initialize the disk (which I have not done). I rebooted once and the same issue shows up. I don't know what specifically is wrong, I hypothesize that maybe the drive's MBR is borked. I have googled fixes and booting to a rescue disk and doing "Bootrec /fixMbr" is often suggested, but I don't want to touch the MBR of my boot drive (SSD) if it's not necessary. Is fixMBR worth trying, and if so, is there a way to direct it only to the MBR of the data drive? Do I need to boot to a rescue disk to accomplish that, or can I just use the command line of my normally booted PC? Is there another approach worth trying? Finally, I do have backups of the data but it runs only weekly, I'd lose a few files. I'd rather grab everything as it was yesterday. If I end up needing to do a disk recovery, I'm not sure what external HDD to buy to hold the recovery. I don't want to spend a ton but the budget 4-8TB options seem to have comments about slow writes. Is there a specific budget option anyone can suggest (external, USB3) that will have non-abysmal write speeds? Don't plan to use it as anything other than a recovery storage location. Attempted fixes: Rebooted. Nothing else. Recent changes: No, although Windows updates itself periodically and I hypothesize the problem may have happened during an automatic reboot to install an update. However the only updates I see for yesterday and today are related to Defender definitions, not sure why that would have caused a reboot. -- Operating system: Win10 Pro 64-bit Location:  I have Googled: Yes Thanks in advance for any help!
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Jul 8, 2020 17:57
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| # ? May 4, 2024 14:45 |
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So for anyone who is curious, it turns out that (reportedly) "Initializing" the disk from Disk Management is non-destructive, it simply rebuilds the MBR if it can. However, this did not help me, it reported a hardware error when trying to initialize. Tried a couple of utilities who were unable to see the disk. My assumption is that the thing is borked. Since most of my stuff was backed up I don't think I'm likely to pursue this further.
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Jul 18, 2020 23:37
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