CheckDisk RAWed my partition & Im RAWing

Everything was going so well this week. I got my fresh Seagate Barracuda 3TB into my PC on the weekend. Spent a couple of days with partitioning, data swapping, defraggings & smileings. Got on with things. Then I woke up this morning to find there were some wacked files. I immediately went to CheckDisk to fix these. I ticked both the boxes. Upon a restart, the window told me that my file system was RAW (once NTFS) and the operation aborted. I now find my only Windows (TM) recourse wants me to reformat the partition. Partition Wizard didn't recover the partition and showed me the fact the files were messed up instead and got these confused with the unaffected partition to boot, sts.

I am about to run a data recovery on the partition... before I try to reanimate the NTFS. I have found a couple of things to try and will share these here if it comes to it. I want to see what the Major Geeks think of these potential solutions to my problems before I plough on through and possibly end myself up with a furtherly damaged file system. First I'll see if any lightning strikes from on high and sparks a fire-storm of genius here. My OS is XP 64pro.

IN SHORT :major I ran CheckDisk & a reboot to run a scan left me with a RAW partition. Ideally I want to fix this, then try to fix the errors in the files. Any thoughts?

 

it may just be the mbr that needs repairing. hds arent my specialty but if the mbr corrupts i think your drive will appear raw.

you can get apps to fix it, i just dont know any off the top of my head

 

Ok cool. I appreciate the reply. I did do a MBR fix with Partition Wizard although no cigar. I was tempted to try TestDisk, and maybe even some DOS program that requires 2 floppy disks & a whole lot of hassle. These seem to be a bit risky though considering that I still have a good partition on the 3TB HDD here. Data Recovery being such a time consuming process too, I think now I want to just reformat and cut my losses. Luckily the data that has been lost was not exactly irreplaceable.

Seems to me with the file system corruption even if I did get the DOS thing to work, I still might have a load of damage to deal with.


Just never run CheckDisk when programs are still in operation on the partition U want to repair. DOH!!

I am now finally afraid enough & am going to back-up my data properly. I think it really is worth it to just fork out a few tonnes of TNT to blow on externals. My priorities have been to cobble together the basics. Now I will tip-toe along until I get the cash together for some RAID tower or something. Looks like I still have alot to query on this cool forum. :cool