Hi,
I have a new hard drive that I set up in a dual boot configuration with Windows 10 and LInux Mint 19.
I am now trying to rescue the system using testdisk (because a Windows 10 update destroyed my ability to boot, similar to this person here
The problem is, neither testdisk nor lsblk nor gparted can "see" my new hard drive. The BIOS detects it just fine and shows it as the correct size on Channel 3 Master.
How can I get the rescue disks to "see" my disk so I can rescue it?
Thanks.

Doesn't seem similar.

If gparted doesn't see it then I'd double check connections. Then I'd get either the OEM diags for that drive and test it. Or get some generic diags.

Is this a somewhat old desktop computer? My older computers have issues with properly supporting some drives. The BIOS may be able to detect the drive and correctly report its capacity, but it just isn't able to boot from it or successfully mount/read/write anything from it even when booted up to another drive.

For example, I have a 30GB Toshiba SSD which only works properly on a couple of my desktop computers (newer). On older ones, the BIOS just plain hangs. On less old ones, the BIOS sees the drive and reports the size correctly, but otherwise the drive does not function properly.

I have a Hitachi 1TB hard drive which I had similar issues with. My older computers couldn't handle it, aside from detecting the drive and reporting its size properly in the BIOS. They were able to work okay with a couple Seagate 1TB and 2TB drives I had. This was pretty stressful for me, since I couldn't predict in advance whether or not a hard drive would work properly with all of my motherboards.

It is a slightly old computer, maybe 4years. The weird thing is, it actually booted several times into Windows until an update seemed to break it. I will try the Seagate diagnostic, as soon as I can figure out how to make a bootable disk when I have no working computer

4 years old is recent enough that I would not expect BIOS/hardware based problems. I expect a computer that young would have no problem properly supporting any SATA drive out there.

I am assuming you're using a LiveCD of Mint19 or something else vaguely recent to run gparted. Is that right? An older liveCD might have problems with any SATA drive bigger than 2TB, or really any SATA drive formatted with GPT instead of MBR (which only supports up to 2TB without some weirdness - this can be a big problem for some external drives which use weird hardware to kludge big sectors for Windows XP support - yeah, Windows XP).

Both Windows 10 and Mint 19 support GPT drives no problem.

Anyway, assuming you're using a version of gparted which supports GPT (probably yes), then I'd be thinking something has gone bad with the drive itself. Or possibly the SATA cable or motherboard interface.

Some of those windows updates are scary. I had a 2008 HP laptop and the last thing it ever did was run a windows update. I couldn't even get a boot prompt.

"booted several times into Windows until an update seemed to break it."

Guess it is possible the drive if kaput too.


Ohh, I get it now. I suspect that the drive is being locked by windows in a hibernate situation.

No, hibernation only locks NTFS filesystems, not device node recognition.

I too have had a HP latop disappear in the great Win10 Anniversary Update fiasco. In my case it destroyed all the partitions - Win10 itself and 2 Linux systems. The machine was still usable, and facilitated the decision to make it Linux only.
I wonder if HP is really at fault since they include a bunch of update tools as well ...

In my case it wasn't the hard drive. afaict, it was a Power On Self Test (POST) failure. I disconnected the drive, and it still failed POST.

Is the BIOS RAID capability enabled or disabled?

Get a windows 10 dvd, any windows 10 dvd and see if it can access the hard drive. I get the feeling I did have a computer that was in hibernate and wouldn't let me access the drive but I could be very well wronk on that.

The Win10 dvd could see the drive but reported it “locked “ when I tried to reinstall. I ran the Seagate tools g from a boot disk and it errored out repeatedly when trying to repair the drive. So, I think the drive is toast, no?

I’m very interested to know what went wrong because I really want to do the win10 and Linux dual boot.

Not toast yet. https://www.dell.com/support/article...ws-10-recovery

Thanks. I tried those steps, and got "element not found" when I ran the dos commands. So I guess I need a new hard drive.

Might have made a small mistake on the command or steps? Remove drive from system and test on other system.

See this. https://www.dell.com/support/article...1/SLN306531/en

You have to be sure you know how your system is keyed to W10. Some bios's have the key in it.