[stranger213]

Alright, I'm to the point of desperation.
Recently I was running a ngame that has worked fine for a very long time. Suddenly, this game froze and refused to give up control of my system, i.e. the entire system froze, right?
So when I restarted, everything on my computer was extremely slow and jerky compared to before, which struck me as odd. So I tried running that game again only to find out that it refused to run now. So I tried another program and IT refused to run. So I tried to see what was wrong and VIEW the files, but when I click on the shortcut to my F: drive (this is a slave I'm talking about) it asked me to reformat the drive itself! Clearly, I can't have this. And I can't directly access any of the files through shortcuts. It's as if windows thinks the drive is completely worthless...ah, the irony.
Is there a way I can get windows to recognize it as a formatted hard drive, or, if it really has to be formatted, is there a way I can retrieve certain files off of the drive before doing so? There are certain directories that I'm extremely reluctant to lose.
Any help would be appreciated!

Windows XP SP2
It's a Seagate 160gb SATA...4400rpm I think? Does that make sense or is that number completely wrong.

P.S. If this has been answered, a link to that topic would help. I leave for college in a few days and I'd love to have this fixed before I leave. Thanks again!

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If you have another hard drive you can boot off of, you can slave yours off of a good one and retreive the files.

[jaxisland]

If you have another hard drive you can boot off of, you can slave yours off of a good one and retreive the files.

[stranger213]

The master drive works perfectly, it's the slave that seems to have broken down. But if your suggestion works, forgive me, I'm extremely inept at hardware issues. I was hoping is was a software problem and that I could fix it without gutting my box at all ._.

[jaxisland]

Which drive is Windows installed on?

[stranger213]

Windows is installed on the master drive. If another drive is required to do this I'm in a bit of a fix, we don't have any spares lying around.

[jaxisland]

Can you go into computer management and see if the drive says healthy or something else?

[stranger213]

Computer management being....that BIOS crap where you press F2 or whatever at startup? Or something in the the Control Panel?

[jaxisland]

Go to Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Computer Management

On the left side, click Disk Management and then see what it says on the right.

[stranger213]

(F:)
Layout: Partition
Type: Basic
File System: (blank)
Status: Healthy
Capacity: 149.05 GB
Free Space: 149.05 GB
% Free: 100 %
Fault Tolerance: No
Overhead 0 %

Please tell me that's a lie.
I really....REALLY want to recover some of those files.

[stranger213]

I also want to ask...In the Computer Management Window, under Event Viewer->System, is it normal to havehundreds of "Errors" with the source "disc"? Because, well, I do.

[stranger213]

Like, I hate to keep bumping this repeatedly, but I really just need to know if it's possible to get back any of the files lost. They're rather important. If you can't help me anymore, and they're lost forever, that's fine, but I need to know.

Thanks bunches.

[jaxisland]

Well, I dont want to say they are gone right now. I just want to get a good handle on whats going on so I can try and help you out.

As for the errors what are their source and event id's?

[stranger213]

All of their sources are 'disc' and all but a couple event id's are '7', the ones that aren't 7 are like 3096 or something.

[jaxisland]

Ok, the first thing we want to try is to run a chkdsk /f /r on the bad drive.

Let me know how it goes.

[stranger213]

I'm on the Verifying File Data stage, and I suppose it's a good sign that it's taking forever, shouldn't that mean that it's going through a lot of data?

*Edit* Now I KNOW that the files are still there, chkdsk has fixed two bad clusters on files on the F: drive.
So does that mean I'll get a full recovery for sure?

Edited by stranger213, 17 August 2006 - 12:39 PM.