My harddrives disappeared after using CCLEANER

This is pretty urgent -

I used CCLEARNER, and also did the firmware update feature. Afterwhich I noticed that all of my backup and library drives with the exception of my C drive and google drive have disappeared. A lot of important stuff gone. Please tell me these haven't been completely wiped, and there is a way to just turn these back on?!

It's unlikely that anything has happened to your drives, it's probably just that Windows can't see/recognise them.

I assume that we are talking about physical drives, either HHDs or SSDs, and not virtual drives.

That isn't a problem that CCleaner would cause, unless there is something very unusual about your system.

However I'm not sure what you are meaning by:

6 hours ago, smibrand said:
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		 also did the firmware update feature. 
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CCleaner doesn't include anything that would update firmware, can you explain more just what you did?

If as I suspect the drives are just not being recognised then do the following:

Open the start menu and type: device


That should show you the Device Manager, click on it to open it.


In the list click the arrow next to 'Disk drives' to see what drives Windows thinks are connected.


On the menu at the top click 'Action' then 'Scan for Hardware Changes'.

image.png

Has that now found your drives again?

Hi

Sorry - by firmware - I meant driver. I used the driver updater. Which wasn't able to update most of the drivers it found, but did a few.

Unfortunately using the "scan of hardware changes" didn't result in anything. After talking to a few people - the running theory is the registry cleaner might've messed something up where the PC can't read the harddrives. I've tried importing my saved .reg backup file but I just get an error with that too.

My harddrives are appearing in my BIOs, so its something in the OS that's wonky. I'm trying to do a OS clean install now - hoping that fixes it. But this is pretty alarming that this happened. I won't trust using CClearner again.