Hard Disk Partition turns from NTFS to RAW !!!

[patteo]

I was setting up this new Laptop that came pre-installed with Windows Vista.

I had re-partition with the shrink and extend command that are native to Vista.

I even did a Full format of the 2nd Partition as Drive D (NTFS).

It seemed to work well for a few days and I was able to copy files to D drive.

And suddenly today, when trying to access D, it says that it is unformatted and would I like to format it???

What a shock. In all my years of computing, I have never seen something like this.

It's unbelievable !

I'm glad it happened now as there isn't much on Drive D as yet. But it could have been a lot worse.

Who knows maybe that's a good reason for many of us to buy more hard disks as backup hard disks.

Has anyone here ever experienced this ?

What may be the cause ?

Is there a utility available to recover the RAW partition to its former NTFS status ?

[mwb1100]

Search for Hard disc recovery threads - I think that most of those utilities should have a good chance of recovering files from the partition:

https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=7495.0
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=5242.0

The one I've used twice to recover files from crashed drives is Restorer 2000 (http://www.restorer2000.com).  I haven't had need to try it on a 'lost' partition like you have, but I've been impressed with how it could pull off files from a drive that Windows would have nothing to do with.

[app103]

I have had some weird probs with things being reported as RAW when they were really FAT32, on a brand new hard drive. I couldn't get windows to recognize them for what they were.

Might want to take a look at this post and see some of the suggestions people made: https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=7214.0