Storage HDD can't be accessed-says needs to be formatted

[mcavoy4]

Hello,I recently had to remove several viruses, root kits, and trojans from my main HDD. In the process I think I must have damaged one or more of my HDDs.My main boot drive (cwill not boot anymore. But even more puzzling is the fact that my second HDD, a 500 gig Seagate, is not accessible any more either. I have tried to access it on another PC, and it is recognized in the BIOS properly, but when I try to open it, it gives me a message "this drive is not formatted-format now?" This is just a storage drive, no OS on it, and I really would like to get the data back. Incidentally, the other drive-the boot drive-which is a 500 gig Seagate as well- is doing the same exact thing. Any suggestions? Thanks...

 

[canadian69]

Sounds like corrupted partition tables, do not reformat them if you need to recover data.

Find a bootable Windows CD and first run
fixmbr
chkdsk - r
If that doesn't work then you may have to find some more robust partion recovery tools. Look into making yourself a bootable CD with utilities.

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

 

[sturm]

Also look for a partition recovery program.
I had a WD 250 suddenly lose its partition info in the middle of running a program.
Remade the partition by copying settings from my other 250 and it worked the rest of the night. Haven't checked it yet today.
Sorry but I don't remember what program it was. At work right now.

 

[mcavoy4]

Canadian69- Thanks for your reply. I will try fixmbr as soon as I get home from work. (Although that is what may have made this HDD inaccessible in the first place)

Sturm- Can I ask what you mean by "copying settings from my other 250"? How exactly did you do this?

And can either of you suggest a program that would fix my partition tables? Maybe a free one perhaps?

Thanks so much for your help. Really just looking to learn more at this point.

 

[dEAne]

You can also try paragon, hirens book disk, norton ghost you can boot from this cd - it has mbr fix tool.