My 1TB external WD recently came up in my disk manager as "unknown volume" and "unallocated partition." The computer was recognizing the volume, but no access to the data. I've had it for a few months, it's formatted NTFS. I am on Vista 32-bit. I put the drive away for a few day and just plugged it back in, and all my data is there, the computer recognizes the volume, etc. Anyone ever hear of this happening? Is this a sign of what's to come? I need to set up a RAID system asap...
I dont think the drive is dying, you could run a DFT on the drive using the manufacturer's software to diagnose the drive. I used to have this happen with certain thumb drives I had. I would put it in one computer and it came up fine other times it would say unallocated. A lot of times it is just due to the enclosure itself dying not the drive.
I did buy a pretty cheap enclosure off ebay, but this will change when i set up a RAID box... if the enclosure is powered and the drive is spinning but it says unallocated, you think this means that the enclosure is failing?