So, I have a bit of a problem and no amount of searching could find the answer. That's shame, because I have horrendous social anxieties and usually I'll fix something myself, if I can.
The issue popped up one day randomly after shutting down with no problems. The computer in question seemed fine. I booted it up and it was exceedingly slow, after about ten minutes of hanging it just continued as normal and seemed okay. I checked it out and it seems as though Windows can't access one of the partitions.
I have an ASSUS ROG G74SX (running Windows 7), two 500gb drives partitioned into four. So I have drives C:, D:, E:, and F: (drive 0 is C:/E: and drive 1 is D:/F:). E: is where I keep my documents, pictures, downloads,, and so on. So much so that I directed the Windows paths there, so My Documents is now E:\My Documents (or just E:\Documents from the command line).
And the partition that can no longer be accessed is E:, so I assume services get caught in a loop trying to access it before they give up.
The system seems to otherwise be fine.
I got Hiren's Boot CD on a bootable USB and had a nose at E: with that, according to TestDiskk, E: is fine, and tests I've run say the drive is healthy. I used NTFS for DOS (in read only mode) to have a nose around the drive, as that's an environment which is familiar to me, so I could check the drive myself... it all seems intact. I can't find any folders missing or other weirdness going on.
On a whim, I decided to check out the System Volume Information directory on each partition, and sue enough, E: had something missing that was present in the others. A 0 byte file named MountPointManagerRemoteDatabase. I was tempted to use EDIT to create a 0 byte file named that before I realised how incredibly stupid doing that would be without asking someone who knows what they're doing, first.
As I really have no idea what I'm doing.
Would that fix it? If not, any ideas as to what might or what the problem is? And mega bonus stress-relieving points for anyone who can tell me why this might have happened. I'm getting a 1TB external soon and doing my best t budget in a new computer (or parts) as that might be necessary.
I really have no idea what I'm doing here, so any help would be appreciated.
I guess the question is, then: Why would there be a partition on a drive that Windows can't read but TestDrive (and other analytics/rescue programs) say is fine?
Thank you in advance! So much, because I'm really so clueless here.
(My apologies in advance if this is the wrong section of StackExchange for this question. And for any typos, as I'm not used to typing on a tablet.)
And this was actually far harder than I thought it would be, I hate social anxieties.
