How to restore a corrupted boot sector/record?

[SaDiZTiKStyLeZ]

This is a fun one...

I've had this drive for a good few years, year or 2 ago I began experiencing read/write errors with another storage drive, in fear of losing data I disconnected them both and sat them aside for about 6mo until I could get new drives to backup data.

I got that taken care of but when I hooked up one of the drives I got a "Drive not formatted. Do you want to format now?" message. I know there is data on the drive. If I didn't want to try and recover what's on it I would just reformat it.

The drive is currently reading as RAW, rather than NTFS. While digging around for information it seemed to have gone along the lines of the boot record/sector got corrupted somehow.
Since it is RAW there is methods of data recovery that I cannot attempt due to the differing file system functionality.

I know there is ways to recover that itself, without formatting the drive and losing data, but it also seems like a delicate/sensitive process. Would definitely feel much more comfortable consulting with someone who has "been there, done that" rather than trying to fix this on my own & possibly botching it up.

 

[Nothinman]

I personally would try a Linux LiveCD before anything else. Windows is pretty bad at dealing with NTFS problems, it pretty much bails and calls any filesystem RAW that it doesn't like even if the filesystem is 99% fine. But Linux will most likely be able to mount and read the filesystem with no problems.