I was running a defrag in XP Pro yesterday evening on a 56gig volume (E: - 2nd hard disk).

At the same time I was installing the Creative 5.1 drivers for my sound card. Once this was done it came up and said that i need to reboot to enable the drivers. I clicked "Finish" expecting it to say reboot now or later, and it started to close programs down and reboot then.

When XP came back up, i tried to look at my D: drive (2nd partition on boot (1st) disk) and it now says "drive is not formatted, do you wish to format it".

What has happened ? Has some sort of disk header been corrupted ? The data must still be there, theres about 7 gig of it and its all me software install directories

Are thre any utilities that i might be able to use to get the volume back and readable without reformatting the partition and losing everything ?

Thanks

Dave

 

Could it be that XP was updating the volume/header (that was NTFS at a previous Win2kPro install) to the latest version of NTFS and thats where it was screwed ?

The data must still be on the disk so surely there is a way for me to get it back.

Dave

[Edited by druddle - 6/19/2002 10:07:14 AM]

 

Right I have had a think about this and I think the best thing is going to be to boot off cd and select the repair option and start the Recovery Console. Run something like a fixboot d: and repair the partition header.

Will that work ?

 

worth a try, sounds like u might have lost all your data though

 

Try this..

http://www.ontrack.co.uk/easyrecovery/

We had a customer's PC partition table wiped by a virus. FDisk reported nothing. Easy Recovery did the job - got most of his documents back

There's a free trial download that will asses what it can recover before you have to shell out any cash.

 

Found out what the problem was. Disk died completely last night !!

Oh well !

Dave