Disk structure is corrupt and not readable

[Whiffen]

Sigh... I have a Western Digital Caviar 250 GB SATAII running as my master hard drive and then I have a Maxtor 80GB IDE hard drive running as a slave for storage.

I used the Maxtor for backing up all my files and where I kept all my installation executables on so if I ever reformatted I wouldn't have to raid the Internet for everything since I could just reinstall it all right away from the Maxtor. I don't recall anything to important fortunately but to save me many pain staking hours I would really like to know if I could get it back.

On to the problem, I was defragmenting my hard drives and decided to run "CHKDSK" on startup. I'm not sure If any errors occurred because I went for a cat nap as it did its thing. I came downstairs to discover that when I went into "My computer" and tried to open "D:" (Maxtor hard drive) this error shows up which hadn't happened before.

D:\ is not accessable.
The disk structure is corrupt and unreadable.

I don't know about you but this doesn't sound like a good thing...
While the drive is still displayed in "My computer" its no longer on the defraging list in Diskeeper.

I'll go look it up on google but are their any suggestions on what I should do now to get the information back?

NEW INFO: It appears that my D: drive has decided it doesn't like the NTFS file format so it ditched me and turned into RAW I heard their is some way to extract the files from it so I'll let you know how it goes, don't hold back to tell me anything though!!!

I guess if worst comes to worst I'll have to reformat the drive. T_T

 

[kimsland]

Hard Drive diagnostic programs
https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic7602.html

 

[DelJo63]

attempt to use the Disk Manager

use Start->All Programs->accessories->(right-click) command prompt->Run As
click and chose the Admin account->enter Admin Password

now in the command window enter diskmgmt.msc

What do you get for the HD and it's partition?

 

[Whiffen]

Well its showing up their and has the right amount of space;

76.32GB Total, Check ;D

76.32GB Free, Apparently Its empty ;(

File format is unspecified, doesn't show up as anything just a blank space but the drive is shown as "Active" . From right clicking the drive and going to its property its showing that the file system is now RAW and not NTFS.


That looks really good kimsland should come in handy but what exactly am I looking for xD MaxBlast, Partition recovery...?

 

[kimsland]

Raw: The volume filesystem type information is unavailable

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/unformat-tutorial.htm

 

[Whiffen]

Oh wow thanks a lot, so fast too ;DDD <3

Shouldn't take much longer... + the cool colourful squares of the recovery map are keeping me busy =p


... and thats when he discovered "This part takes about two hours for every 100GB of a disk space to be processed and requires absolutely no intervention." DOH well I'll be back in an hour then. Thanks!!!

 

[Whiffen]

Later that night!

Alright, it did its job ;D I was disappointed I could only copy a few things off from that but hey it was free and I was able to write down everything I had so now I know I wont be missing anything and luckily from the 4 folders I was allowed to select to take with me it was just enough to save my word documents and other stuff. The rest was just driver and software setups so Ill just get those again and reformat the drive.

Thanks!

 

[kimsland]

3 folders down only (for the unpaid version)

Well done. Thanks for the reply too

 

[Whiffen]

Alright so I got past that part, but now my computer seems to have taken a liking to this "CHKDSK" on startup and its doing it every time I restart. I made sure it was off in Diskeeper but that hasn't done anything, is their someway I can stop it?

Oh and when I reformatted that D drive (Maxtor), by right clicking the icon in my computer and clicking format, it will start and but by the end of formatting I get this error about it not being able to finish so If you have any ideas on that... I might try that Darik's Boot and Nuke or Partition Magic but if you have any other ideas that would be great. Anyway I'm going to try the format again so I can tell you what the error message says.

Thanks

 

[kimsland]

Well a Drive Diagnostic test may be a good idea at this point.

 

[Whiffen]

I just let it finish CHKDSK another time... Now it has stopped running on startup and my D: drive magically fixed itself. Lol thanks for all the help ;D

 

[kimsland]

Please read about chkntfs.exe here --> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/160963
It will stop or default Check Disk back to its normal operation

run chkdsk /f d: and let it run to completion at least once. (actually you have done this now)
then go back and run chkntfs /d (to put it to default)

I'm starting to like chkntfs !