Hi there!

I have never had any trouble with my system (bought Nov. 2001) until last week.

My primary HD is 80gb Maxtor with 8mb cache, on which i have only windows xp pro and a few games which i never play. My second HD is a 115gb IBM deskstar which is about 4 months old at most, is on as a primary slave; and at the last glance possible, held about 110gb worth of data ranging from mp3s and videos to university work and misc. documents. Both HDs are NTFS.

I have always considered myself a very careful user and for what it is my system has always been notably fast, although i have never modded it or anything like that.

The other day I turned my computer off in the normal manner and went to bed. To my horror the next day i turned it on to find that the D (secondary) drive was not accessible. Ever since then I have been given a message to the effect 'D:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.'

I have tried this HD in other XP computers to be met with the same message, and I have tried another NTFS HD in its place in my system and that works fine.

I have never knowingly had a virus on my system, and have always had an up-to-date Mcafee Virusscan (inc firewall) Retail 7.0 running.

I use soulseek as my only download software, which saved to the D drive, however I had not used it on the day in question.

Is there any way to retrieve this 110gb of what to me is necessary data? I have tried scan disk but it stops before it starts, and the HD properties tells me that the partition is RAW.

I would be extremely grateful if someone could help me out. I'm close to dispair at the moment as I've got a uni retake in a fortnight and my notes have dissappeared!!

[I know it's silly not to backup, but i haven't got the cash to do so at the moment]

I look forward to any responses. Cheers!

The best, and only way that has worked for me, is to use the following software. I know it works as I just used it tonight to recover data from a RAW NTFS drive that was part of a RAID set that got corrupted when windows crashed. So much for data security with mirrored RAID sets. I lost my set.

I've tried other software without success in the past, but this one will actually recover your data with all the correct names and directory structure intact. It's called GetDataBack for NTFS v2.2, and you can find it here ...

Runtime.org

You will need another drive to store any recovered files.

Let us know if it works for you.

Ontrack's Easy Recovery Pro is the best recovery utility I have found. It has many options and can try different ways of recovering your data. You will need a separate drive or partition to save recovered data.
http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/

I have used Ontrack EasyRecovery v6.03 Pro, and it doesn't work. It gets you files and folders that are unidentifiable and without original filenames or directory structure. It sucks big time. I used it more than once, before discovering GetDataBack, and I never had it retrieve anything recognisable, or useful, before. GetDataBack works without fault. It is perfect, or as near perfect as a recovery application can be. I can't live without it now. I can't praise it enough. It's the best. Nothing else I've ever tried, and I've tried a few, works. The real deal. Spread the word.

thanks guys i'll give them a go immediately!

i'll post my results soon.

I've used Ontrack's Easy Recovery many times, on probably around a hundred disks and never had a problem with it. There have been times I couldn't get data, or got partial data but thats what happens when you try to recover lost files. there is no guarrantee that you'll get them back. I have tried every utility I could find for recovery even the one you mentioned, the most reliable one I found was Ontrack.

In some recovery modes, Ontrack will recover partial and damaged files, this sounds like what happened to you Nic. I still don't understand how NOTHING else worked for you. I've used every recovery utility I have ever heard mention of, and all of them have worked to a point. All of them have failed horribly as well. Data recovery is sketchy at best, no matter what you use. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never tried to too many times.

You're right Storm, data recovery is sketchy at best. I've never had much success before. I'll admit that I never tried ALL the recovery options available in EasyRecovery, so that may be one reason why I did'nt have much success with it. It did recover files, but they had numeric names and were unrecognisable, so they were essentially useless (despite the fact that I knew the data was intact as the drive had not been written to). GetDataBack just ran and worked, so it impressed me a lot. Maybe I just got 'lucky', as I've only used it once, and it worked, so I was happy. There are also has some interesting comments from customers on that site, as they also had troubles with other software (apparently ), and GetDataBack managed to save the day. My experience mirrors some of these stories.

I'm having a similar problem to random crash and GetDataBack is working great so far. Does anyone know what causes this problem? I feel a little hesitant to just format, cross my fingers and hope that it doesn't happen again. Is it likely to happen again?

Well it sounds like a drive problem, not a software problem like a crash, for you have to use another drive. Unless the boot sector of the drive gets corrupted and you have to repartition the drive. But you want to recover the stuff on the drive first before repartitioning the drive. My opinion. And yea I know the deal with opinions thank you.

I successfully backed up all the data from the corrupted hdd to another drive that I had laying around and formatted the drive and repartitioned. What I meant to originally ask was: now that I formatted and repartitioned and everything is working normally again.. do you think this will occur again, like said before, because it was a problem with the drive itself? That was what I meant by being hesitant to put data back on it.

RandomcRash's problem was that his HD was filled to overflowing!!
You should leave at least about 10-15GB of space free on any partition/HD, otherwise you could never even defrag it.

One way to control LOW disk space, is found here:
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/software/spacecontrol

Thanks for the posts on this question, I've been sitting around for the last few hours trying to figure out why I get "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable" and and NTFS disk event 55 error. I can't evern run chkdsk! Now I know I overflowed my disk and once I recover everything with get data back, fingers crossed! I will partition 10-15gigs for unused space from now on. Thanks everyone for good input.