Win8 backup drive switched Letter, unreadable

[Sinistar]

I have a USB drive for backup, yesterday the drive letter changed from h: to k:, and is now unreadable. If I boot into Linux on the same machine the drive works fine, also works fine on a laptop running Vista. I have googled this without much luck, people having problems with boot drive switching to x is about all I have found. Any suggestions?

 

[smw]

Well if h: is still available you can try to give it back its old letter:
Start menu-> type "diskmgmt.msc" in the search field -> right click on the external drive -> Change Drive Letter and Paths -> Change... -> Select H: from the drop down menu.
Of course even if it works this is still a problem and perhaps you should report it (although I don't think that I have trouble with my external drive when it changes letters so I don't know how hard it would be to pinpoint the problem)

 

[Sinistar]

That doesn't work, gets stuck "Loading disk configuration information" no drive show up.

 

[Davros]

give this a try
find out what format it is (fat/fat32/ntfs ect)
copy your data somewhere safe
format the drive (in windows)

you could try partitioning it then format if the above doesnt work

or look here :
http://www.vistax64.com/general-discussion/175828-disk-management-never-starts.html

 

[Sinistar]

yeah, that is going to be my last resort. As for that link, Disk manager work fine when the usb drive is disconnected, and other drives work just fine. Its really odd that it woks in Linux, and Vista. I'm going to backup some steam games I downloaded today, and then restore the system from a backup, and see what happens.

Edit:

Well that didn't work, don't have anything to back it up to right now, so I'll just have to wait.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Have you tried any other USB external drives? There's a possibility the USB driver has become borked. Or there's the potential for some sort of malware that targets only USB drives.

Regards,
SB

 

[Sinistar]

Yes, other USB drives work fine. I not going to mess with it again until this weekend, I will get another drive then.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Or the USB controller of the drive enclosure could be semi-failing. Unless if it's one of those hard drives with glued-on USB, you might still be able to salvage the drive.

vice-versa, the drive itself could be failing and have some bad clusters. Under linux, maybe loading gparted (a piece of software that looks like Windows's disk management basically) would make it crash as it scans the disk for partitions.