Hard Drive Not Formatted??? HELP!

[TeuffelHunden]

Hi all,

I'm running winXP with 2 hard drives: C and D.

C is the OS hard drive (NTFS) and D is an extra storage hard drive (Fat32). I've had this setup for quite a while. Then yesterday, out of the blue, when I try to access the D drive I get a message saying that D is not formatted! The drive is recognized in the bios correctly as a 120 gig drive, and a data recovery program that I have (GetDataBack) recognizes it as a FAT32 drive. But windows says size=0 free space=0. I REALLY do not want to reformatt, since EVERYTHING I need is on that drive. Is there a way to fix it without reformatting??

By the way, the last thing I did before the problem was to change the dpi in the display settings...not sure how it could be related, if at all.

 

[redduc900]

Try running a HDD diagnostic, which is available from the drive manufacturer's website.

 

[TeuffelHunden]

ran the diagnostic (don't know why I didn't think of that first) and it failed the SMART test. I was able to save a lot of the data using a dos based program called xxcopy and copying files in dos mode to a different hard drive. I still ended up with a bit of data loss, but it could have been much worse.

The drives is just over a year old, and Maxtor only warranties for a year, so I'm SOL...so I used it as an excuse to buy a new 120GB Seagate (5 year waranty!)