Drive not formatted? Was fine earlier

[vesp]

Just had a weird error that I hope someone can maybe help with a solution :s

Basically, a storage hard drive that has always been fine is now apparently "not formatted" according to winXP, which wants me to format it. I've got a program that might be able to recover files but wondered if there was something out there that wouldn't take messing around with extra drives and hours to copy (hopefully) recoverable files :/

[obsidian]

Probably a corrupt Master Boot Record?

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/483/xp_r ... y_console/

An Ubuntu LiveCD will also mount the drive if you need to pull information off of it.

[vesp]

Ok, I can try and rewrite the MBR, but would that affect it if I'm only accessing it from "My Compter"? (boot drive is fine as is another storage drive... just this one for some reason).

I'm at a loss as to why it's happened as I don't think I've even used that drive recently!

[obsidian]

Not the MBR of your main disc, but the one that isn't working. Each disc has it's own MBR and I suspect the one in question is corrupt.

[vesp]

heh, finally got time to sit down and do some proper troubleshooting - just ran a chkdsk /F on it from the command prompt as a preliminary check... and that sorted it!
(whatever "it" was!). Still dunno why it happened.

Cheers obsidian -