I was downloading from a website that I always use to find games or information. I downloaded a iso.file. by accident I clicked open instead extracting the image and hidden files. The process shut down instantly and my second hard drive is now corrupted and unreadable. I have tried all the usual tactics to get around this. While the computer can still recognize the drive as being attached, it is saying there is no information on it. It shows the drive size and free space as the same, 40gig. The MBR seems to be intact but I still cannot fix the problem. Is there any help or tips anyone has to help me out???


Thanks.

First off, don't download things off the net that you don't know what they do, or who they are from. There all sorts of malicous files out there that look harmless, and things like this happen.

BTW
Welcome to TechSpot

sounds like the partition map is damaged. PM might be able to rescue the filesystem.

Wow, you are really smart, and wise! The next time I need to make toast I should ask you the obvious. Like I didn't know what the file did, where it came from, and obviously I checked it for a virus before doing anything. The PROBLEM was I accidently opened it before I had a chance to extract it. The drive was old anyway and it was just crap on it anyway.

PM:== Partition Magic software

I should have been more explicit.

I had a similar problem with a client's pc, basically it would not boot at all, couldn't reinstall Windows, anything. The drive was only 6 months old. I removed it and put it in one of my own pc's, it showed as 0gb free, 0gb used, I used Microsoft Management Console to format the drive, it then returned to being an 80gb drive as it's supposed to be! Replaced it back in their pc, reinstalled Windows and all was fine again.

Kevin

Well, from reading your first post it didn't sound too much like you knew what you were doing... Especially since the only thing that should happen when you open an image file is that you launch whatever program you have associated with the extension and it will then try to do something to it, and not corrupt an entire harddrive....

Since you fail to give us the information about what program you have associated with the .iso, forgot to tell us that it was an old drive which might have died of natural causes, and didn't bother to tell us what "the usual tactics to get around this" are in your book, don't be surprised to get very general advice for beginners at first.


Now, with that out of the way, what have you tried (and what program is associated with image files on your machine)?
Have you tried using, as jobeard suggested, Partition Magic?
If that doesn't work, perhaps you'll have better luck with SpinRite6... If the FAT has been written to a faulty sector, it should be able to recover it, and thus give you access to the drive's content.

I think it's too late to continue help on this. They have alraedy formatted the drive and replaced Windows.

Glad you got your computer fixed. Next time don't be bashful about handing out information, too much information is a good thing. It's better to have it than to have to ask for it.

See ya around TS