drive shows as unformatted

Turned on my computer today and went to navigate to my secondry hard drive to play some tunes to discover that windows now thinks that drive is unformatted (raw). I am using windows xp pro. Have had no warning messages or other problems on this machine.

Booted from a boot floppy and checked in fdisk and it shows the drive as partioned and formatted as fat 32 as I said however windows shows it as raw????

Any ideas?

All thoughts gratefully accepted

 

Did the drive make any sounds before this happen like grinding? I would go into Control Panel-Administrative tools then computer management and click on storage then disk management. Click on the drive and see if it reads healthy and online. If it's O.K. then is the data on the drive worth $40? You can get DiskPatch to fix it up for you.
http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/~tkuurstra/DiskPatch.htm

 

Hi Rainbow


Thank you for the reply.

No there was no strange noises or error messages other than the fact this drive shows as being raw. The disk spins up as normal no strange noises.Everthing checks out healthy in computer management.
It appears as normal in bios and, if it means anything, during post it shows as smart capable and status ok. Have had a look at the drive in both partition manager, and as I said, fdisk and the drive seems formatted. I have changed the cables, just in case.

I have scanned the system with both Norton 2002 and House Call and found nothing, though in my admittedly lowly experiance, I have never heard of a virus that would attack soley data on the second drive? There has also not been any changes to the machine recently either, neither hardware or software. It was simply shutdown one evening and when restarted the next day the drive was showing as unformatted.

The data is not really all that important or valuable, its the confusion of not knowing what has happened that is getting to me. I will no doubt eventually give in and simply reformat but for now I can enjoy the hunt for the solution.

 

To add I have also tried this drive in another machine and its fine. So I have taken a third drive and placed it into the faulty machine to check its not a fault with the ide controller and it shows that drive as fine and formatted correctly.
So I'm more confused but have recovered all the data.

Original drive has gone back into the machine and still shows as raw.

Oh well I guess it's not meant to be easy.