Cause of lost partition replaced by 2 Raw partitions

Posted by DwightSampsonite on Super User See other posts from Super User or by DwightSampsonite
Published on 2010-05-31T00:07:17Z Indexed on 2010/05/31 0:13 UTC
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windows-xp

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hard-drive

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partition

Hi,

I had a curious problem over the weekend... My 500gb WD hard drive all of a sudden could not be discovered by xp, then when I plugged in again via USB it was being discovered as 2 separate Raw partitions that were asking to be formatted. I have never modified partitions on this drive before. I was scratching my head for about this for 20mins or so when my second 1TB external hard drive did the exact same thing(with the same sized raw partitions as the 500gb).

I have since recovered the original partitions and data using Testdisk . I am more curious on the cause.... I suspect this could be a virus, however my machine hadn’t been online in a few days and AVG didn’t detect anything.

Has anyone seen this before?

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