I was reviving a Blue Screen Of Death plagued computer of a friend of mine earlier this week, and after reinstalling Windows XP, I reconnected his secondary 200GB drive and went to go looksie.

The drive showed up under "My Computer", however displayed the following message if you tried to access it:

The drive is not formatted, do you want to format it now?

For the Impatient

You have a software error on your hands. You most likely need to restore the boot sector from the backup boot sector and rewrite the partition structure on the drive. You will want to use TestDisk. There is a Testdisk Step By Step Guide that runs you straight through a standard recovery process. Just take it nice and slow, and read the instructions carefully.


The symptoms

Other symptoms may be that the drive no longer shows up in in Windows Explorer, and the Windows Disk Management Console displays "Unallocated Space" where the partition had been previously present.



If your drive was the primary drive, windows would probably refuse to boot up – and in all cases, the drive/partition would fail to mount in a Linux live CD or similar.



If you tried to run chkdsk on the drive, you would be greeted with the following:



The type of the filesystem is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.

The diagnosis

If you are looking to get a drive simply working and are not worried about rescuing data, formatting may be the solution for you – it will wipe the drive (not really, but file recovery will be insanely more difficult), fix up corrupt boot sectors, and rebuild your partition structure. The issue here is a software issue, not a hardware issue, so formatting is a quick fix.



If on the other hand you need the drive working again with the original files still on there, you are going to have to do a bit of work.



The solution

TestDisk is a "powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy."



Testdisk can be used to recover or revive RAW partitions no matter which operating system you prefer; DOS, Windows XP, Unix, Linux, BSD and Mac OS X and more. It has an impressive list of filesystems that it can find lost partitions for as well as a great set of documentation to support it.



I ran TestDisk from within windows using the Testdisk Step By Step Guide, after which it was just a reboot and I was up and running. No mucking around with extracting files using expensive proprietary software, or trialware limited to 4 files per run!



So maybe next time you will think twice before hitting format when a drive goes down.