Windows XP Indicates Second Hard Drive Needs Formatting

swagfuswagfu
edited August 2006 in Hardware
Hi all,

Last night before going to bed, I moved about 60gb of data to a different hard drive. When getting up this morning, it now show th drive I transferred to has nothing on it and is 100% empty. It keeps asking me to format the drive. I do not want to do this as there really is about 100gb or so of information on there. Is there anything I can do to not lose it all??????

I am pretty computer savy, but not an expert by any means. I can follow detailed directions on the computer.

Oh yeah, it should be file system of NTFS and now it shows RAW.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Kevin

Comments

  • airbornflghtairbornflght Houston, TX Icrontian
    edited August 2006
    did the mft get deleted?

    I forget if there is a way to rebuild it or not, you could try a data recovery app that is meant to recover deleted files, I think norton makes one, and quite a few other companies do also.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited August 2006
    You could try a Windows "repair" installation. Are you running WindowsXP?
  • swagfuswagfu
    edited August 2006
    Leonardo wrote:
    You could try a Windows "repair" installation. Are you running WindowsXP?


    I am running windows xp pro. This not the main drive but strctly a drive I use for data storage. There are no programs on it.

    I am not sure what an MFT is to let you know if that got deleted or not.
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited August 2006
    See if TestDisk can find the missing partition on the drive in question. :)
  • airbornflghtairbornflght Houston, TX Icrontian
    edited August 2006
    MFT is the Master File Table, it is part of the file system;

    The way that a file system works is that it 'indexes' all of the files in the MFT, so that it knows where all of the files are on the hard drive, this gives you faster response on the hard drive, and allows you to have folder/shortcuts.

    Normally, when you delete a file, it's entry in the MFT is just overwritted to available, that is why data can be normally recovered when you delete a file, and even if you do a quick format. Chances are, it just didnt delete itself, and it usually takes someone messing with things they shouldnt. Im not saying that is what you did, but I have seen it done, there quite a few other things that it could be also.
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