My former windows vista drive is now in RAW data format?

Question

For the past year I have had constant issues with Vista crashing, and not being able to run well on my computer. I have finally decided to put back on XP. The drive vista was on is still intact. I removed that drive from my machine. I installed a new drive on my computer, put on XP and I'm good to go. Now the problem is when I installed that 2nd drive (that still has vista), I went to access it from XP and it says in order to access the drive you must format it. It apparently is in raw data format. I did nothing to format the drive or erase anything, it should be fully accessable and yet it is not. What could be the problem??

Answer 1

The file system on the 2nd drive may have a problem.  The first thing you should do is run chkdsk.  Click start then run and type cmd in the box and click  ok.  In the command box type chkdsk /r followed by the drive letter e.g. chkdsk /r d:

Answer 2

Your partition table has become corrupt, it happens to the best of us and it's an awful experience, it's okay though all of your files are still there (just don't move any files to or from the harddrive until you're finished).

There's two ways to fix this.

1) Rebuild the partition table

2) Use a data recovery program, these usually take a long time to complete since they have to convert every file, but it's very effective.

However specialized software is required for both of these and they usually cost something, but I'm sure there's ways to find these for free ;).

Here's some good software for rebuilding your partition table:

http://www.ptdd.com/rpt.htm

Here's some data recovery software

http://www.ontrack.com/ - ontrack

http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofe... - Easy Recovery

http://www.runtime.org/ - GetDataBack

http://www.stellarinfo.com/

http://www.bitmart.net/ - Restorer 2000

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration... - Restoration

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/activeundel... - Active undelete

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/... - PC inspector

Good Luck!