ok, i have vista installed on my 3rd hard drive, brand new only a few days old, and i'm loading vista, and all of the sudden my grandmother desides to start flicking power circuts down stairs, so the power goes out, i start it up again, and it won't boot to vista, so i boot to XP and it starts fine except i can't see my 3rd drive

i don't care about the data on it, so i tryed to reformat, but i can't get to it from my computer, i tryed to use maxblast4, which came with the HDD. it says thats theres no partition, i think ok, make one and format, but when i try to do that using maxblaster, i hangs and does nothing (trust me, i left it overnight) so when i go to the disk management in computer managment, it says that the drive is not inisalized, so i try to do that, and nothing happens, at all

i'm out of ideas, what do i do?

Try using SpinRite (not free, but you can always "buy" it) on your 3rd harddrive...

doesn't work, the current drive letter is F but nothing can find drive F

The fact you can't create a partition suggests some low level damage may have occured at the beginning of the drive.  Badly timed power failures can sometimes cause that.

You should run Maxtor diagnostics and try to perform a low level format of the drive.  That might return it to usable; if not, or if the low level format hangs as well, the drive is most likely permanently damaged.

The moral?  Invest in a small UPS unit.  They aren't expensive and you would be really wishing you had one right about now, if the outage had got the drive with your data instead of the fresh Vista install.

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Originally posted by NiteMare
doesn't work, the current drive letter is F but nothing can find drive F

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yes, it says it can't find drive F


insperation struck, and i tryed a hard boot (completely turning the power off to the power supply), and when i restarted there drive was back, i had to format it, but atleast i was able to do that, thanks for your help