question on my hardisk

[PowerYoga]

today when i was trying to use my D drive, it says "drive is not formatted".

It was working fine yesterday, does anyone know whats wrong, and how i can rescue my files?


My operating system is Windows XP. and the hardisk is a WD 60gb Caviar.

Epox 8k7A
1.2 ghz T-bird
512 DDR 2100 ram

 

[Lord Evermore]

Well, run chkdsk on your C drive and have it "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors", which is basically a surface scan. Just to be sure that part is safe.

Something may be corrupted. Or you may have a virus if you aren't running a virus scanner. You can do a free online scan at www.antivirus.com. The drive may be failing. You may have encountered a "malicious" script on a webpage that managed to format the drive. Could be many things.

The only way to get the data back would be to get software that reads the drive surface and ignores the file system, or tries to reconstruct it (or pay for a service company that does the same thing).

Of course, you DO make regular backups, right?

Undelete is one software package. It's not specified whether it can recover an entire partition though. It looks like it only undeletes within a file system (a working one).

Also Undelete, oddly the same product name. Also doesn't mention partitions.

Stellar Phoenix specifically mentions accidental formats. You have to buy it specifically for the file systems you use apparently.

VirtualLab is similar.

 

[PowerYoga]

actually i have no idea what it could be. The drive was working fine yesterday, because i moved a few mp3s around. Today when i turned on my computer, it stopped working. (of course, i hadn't turned off my computer for 2 days)

as for the backups.... i do have a backup of SOME of the stuff from about a month ago, but the drive had seen a lot of activity in the past week. It is barely a year old, also.

Any idea how i can find a program that reads the drive without going through the system? (without paying)

i don't think it's a virus because the machine virus scans every friday, and when i came back home it has already finished scanning for that day.

i'm baffled...

 

[PowerYoga]

oh, i ran chkdsk on C drive and nothing is wrong with it. However, i can't read D drive. I'm starting to think that the volume could be corrupted. Is there a good way i can rescue (some) of my files without having to format my HDD?

the HDD did crash once before with the same exact problem, except that time it was due to a virus. It had some bad sectors and i low-level formatted it. Could it be that my hdd is dying?

 

[Lord Evermore]

I don't personally know of any freeware that would let you recover data in this case. The drive could be going bad, but it could be software issues.

I seem to recall that Partition Magic had the capability of "finding" old partitions to rebuild them. But that was several versions ago, not sure if they still have it (and of course only the newest version works with XP).

Forgot to mention that you could run Western Digital's "Data Lifeguard" software to scan the disc and check for problems. Just make sure you don't run the destructive scan.

 

[PowerYoga]

i tried to run the datalifeguards but it wouldn't run the scan for some reason. I rebooted using that disk and it doesn't let me run the scan. It loads dlgdiag and then doesn't do anything.


I will try partition magic and see if that solves anything.