Second drive suddenly not formatted...

Hi all. 160G Maxtor Sata drive on a LanParty MOBO decided to not be formatted. For no reason that I can detect. Had about 100G of data on it; has been stable for several months since install. Did a reboot and bam. "drive not formatted. would you like to......"

Any ideas for data recovery? Is the drive hosed? What the heck would cause this?

Win 2000pro btw.

Thanks for your time.

 

In my experience there is very little you can do about this. There is a handful of data recovery tools you can try, but pretty much all of them require the partition to be formatted to even attempt anything. I've gotten past this by doing quick formats so as not to erase the data on the disk. But to be honest I rarely manage to recover anythign this way.

Alternativly you can pay big bucks to get data recovered professionally, but it's expensive. SO your best bet is to give the programs and try, and if they fail you're basicly SOL.

 

The partion table may be corrupt. Download and burn Knoppix 'Live'. Make sure that the drive can not be accessed with knoppix. If Knoppix can read the drive then use QtParted to resize the partition, then reboot the computer. This may or may not work.

 

think shadows suggestion is excellent,
also is there another computer you could attach the drive to as slave and maybe move some files that way? If you do have to reformat at least you may be able to recover some of your files first.
Oops just caught that "second" drive part...If this is not the main drive disregard my last post.. as obviously the main drive can't read it.
it's late sorry about that.