First off, a huge thanks to anyone who can help me solve this interesting problem: I have two HDs, a 60gig (C:\) that I use mainly for running WinXP and a few programs, and a 120gig (F:\) that I use for games and media files (I believe the second is a Maxtor drive). On my 120gig drive, I have a folder that leads to subfolders, each containing a selection of game files, music files, movie files, utility files, etc. Just last night I tried opening one of the subfolders, and it paused for a few seconds, and then gave me the message "The disk in drive F:\ is not formatted. Would you like to format it now?"...ACK! (I clicked no, a bit shaken up at the sight of 'the F-word'). Here is the strange part: It only does that with the last three subfolders shown alphabetically. The others open perfectly fine. I can also right click and check the properties, but it just says there are 0 files... I believe this may be related to an earlier problem I had posted about, where a selection of my music spontaneously disappeared. My (then) music folder would have come 4th from the end alphabetically, and it was all the files after the letter B that had disappeared...perhaps they were all corrupted at the same time and I hadn't discovered it until now? I guess what I'm looking for is: does anyone know how to get my files back?! I tried a defrag when I was having music file troubles, but I can try it again...I'm off to run a virus scan, *hoping* that something will heal... Again, a huge thanks in advance... === Pentium 4 2.0a gHz Win XP (SP 2) 1.25gig RAM ===
I'd do that first. Second thing I'd check is the IDE cable. If that's bad, even one wire, you can get all sorts of hell from it. Next I'd get some diagnostic software from the manufacturer of the problematic drive and run it. It may very well be on a floppy disk that came with your drive if you bought it retail.
Thanks guys...I got some diagnostic software from Maxtor...it's given me some sort of error code, but still hasn't told me what the exact problem is or how to fix it. On the bright side, I can ship this drive to them and they'll send me a replacement...but still no hope for my missing data...
