stevenoc Posted January 14, 2008 Report Share Posted January 14, 2008 Hello,I am running Windows XP Professional. I have a 160 GB hard drive which I partitioned into a C and D drive. The computer doesn't have any problems booting up but my D drive is suddenly not working. It says "Hard drive not formatted". I tried restoring the system to a previous point but still gives the same error. Any idea on what I can do to recover my data?Thanks in advance! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boris Posted January 14, 2008 Report Share Posted January 14, 2008 Is it a FAT 32 or NTFS partition ?How is it recognised under Disk Management ? (Start - Run - diskmgmt.msc - OK) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stevenoc Posted January 16, 2008 Author Report Share Posted January 16, 2008 Hi,I checked and it is NTFS and in the disk management program it shows drive "D:" as healthy. That is really weird. C: is my primary partitionD: is an extended partition/logical driveAny idea what I should do?Thanks again! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wickedadmin Posted January 16, 2008 Report Share Posted January 16, 2008 If that partition is empty just re-format it. You can do that in Disk managment also. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stevenoc Posted January 17, 2008 Author Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 The "D" partition does show it is 100% free.I had some data in that partition so is there anyway I can get the data off before reformatting? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 Can you actually access the D: drive (with Windows Explorer)? If so, can you see anything on it?If not, you might try http://www.recuva.com/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stevenoc Posted January 17, 2008 Author Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 I can't access it thru windows explorer. When I click on the d drive it'll pop up with the window "Drive not formatted".Everything else on the computer works. Really strange how this even happened. I didn't install anything new either.Thanks again! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seshomaru Samma Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 To access you data use any Linux Live CD - Knoppix is the best one (click on the American/British flag to display in English). You can use it to back up your data to a removable media or to the C partition and then reformat D. You will need a CD burner for that Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stevenoc Posted January 18, 2008 Author Report Share Posted January 18, 2008 Thanks so much for the tip on Knoppix. I was able to boot up with that and browse the contents of my hard drive..even the bad partition windows wouldn't recognize. Was able to copy a few files I didn't back up.A real life saver! Thanks again for everyone's help! Really appreciate it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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