Harddrive "disconnects" but is still visible

[XistenZ]

Hi, I promised a friend to recover their files from their laptop, since it's no big deal to click next one or two times in a program and wait a few hours I thought it would be over in a jiffy. Alas, it appears one of the partitions (the one the system was on) have been damaged somehow. Whenever I try to search it, it runs for awhile but then the software returns an error saying something in the lines of "[partition] does not respond, I/O error". After that I can no longer acess it from My Computer, even though I see it there (the other partitions from the same drive is accessible, also, the numbers indicating available space is completely gone from the affected partition, they were there before it "disconnected"). I have to reboot to make it accessible again.

Any "fix bad sector"-scans say it's no problem with it, tried a few programs.

 

[sPlAtOiD]

I believe you lost the access to that data in the conventional way. You should try to get some date restore software and see if you can retrieve the lost files.

 

[Veraster]

Have you tried scanning the drive for errors in windows explorer by right clicking on the drive, choosing properties, going to the "tools" tab and scanning the drive for errors?
If so, what about recovering the files in Ubuntu or some other Linux distribution? Windows might just be denying access because it's being an ass like it likes to do sometimes.