Hard drive problem (winXp saying drive not formated)

[jonnyapple83]

So all of a sudden I lost access to my large data file hard drive (luckly I don't run windows on it). So now when I go into my computer, I can see the Hard drive but I can't access it. Windows pops up with a "Disk is not formatted" window, and asks if I want to format the drive. But I already formated and partioned this drive with an NTFS file system long ago and it should have a lot of my important files on it. Now when I go into the disk management it shows no file system.

Please help me out, is there any good (hopefully free) software i can get to fix my drive? (recover the file system)

 

[imported_raybay]

Do nothing more with that drive, as it is probably bad and almost anything you do could make it worse.
There are recovery programs for $29 that may work. If you have another drive, you can get and OS installed on it, slave the bad drive, and use OnTrack Recovery to save the data. OnTrack allows ONE trial use. You need to know something about hard drive structure, files, partitions, and so on. There are several other programs you can find in a google search. Read everything you can before you try it. You might get lucky and find that although it is not bootable, that you can drag files off it when treated as a slave.

It is possible you could make that drive become so damaged that files cannot be recovered so treat it carefully for the time being.

 

[jonnyapple83]

thank your raybay, does anyone else have anymore info on how to deal with this problem? Could I possibly use the windows XP cd's restore consel to try and fix the hard drive(the drive itself contains no win XP installation)?

 

[Sianath]

There's a few reasons this can happen, and some are easily recovered. Make sure you are booted up with the problem disk attached to the system.

Download and run the MPS Reports tool.. (you can search http://support.microsoft.com for it for future reference)

Send me the sector inspector output (the file is called FTDMPNT.TXT), or if you don't want to deal with extracting it, send the whole thing at sianath@hotmail.com.

If the output is too large for that, PM me and I'll reply with my work address for you to send it to.