my D drive has packed up it has all my pics and vid ect on it....

it shows up in explorer but windows cant read it... i get the following message:

Location is not available
D:\ is not accessible.

The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

any ideas how to restore this without formatting the drive

i tried to run fdisk but got the same error as above



e2a: scandisk deleted 2 files from it when i rebooted before it disappeared

It's not looking good for you from what you describe either the hdd (circuit board)controller or the motor has gone.... you can check the motor by listening to the drive and feeling it best way is to touch the drive with a screw driver and hold ur ear to the over end, if you can hear it spinning then all you need is a exact same drive and swap the controller card over. I had to do this a while ago with one of mine to recover all my music. hope this help's

thanks groovelick... the drive is spinning.... could it just be the mbr thats corrupt? in which case ill just low level it

You could try a low level but this would destroy any data on it if it worked and I thought that you wanted the data on it

i do m8.... im just leaving the stuff on there as i have a spare 140gb hard disk in machine now.... taking ages to format it tho

dude, dont format your drive just yet.. it could just be the partition info is missing. there are many many many tools that will get "most", if not all of the data back..

There is a disk you can download called Hiren's BootCD - It has every tool you will need to get your shit back up and running..

Active Partition Recovery 3.0
To Recover a Deleted partition.

Active Uneraser 3.0
To recover deleted files and folders on FAT and NTFS systems.

Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro 6.10
To Recover data that has been deleted/virus attack

Winternals Disk Commander 1.1
more than just a standard deleted-file recovery utility

TestDisk 6.11.3
Tool to check and undelete partition from Dos/Windows

Lost & Found 1.06
a good old data recovery software.

DiyDataRecovery Diskpatch 2.1.100
An excellent data recovery software.

Prosoft Media Tools 5.0 v1.1.2.64
Another excellent data recovery software with many other options.

PhotoRec 6.11.3
Tool to Recover File and pictures from Dos/Windows

Active Undelete 5.5
a tool to recover deleted files

Restoration 3.2.13
a tool to recover deleted files

GetDataBack for FAT 4.0
Data recovery software for FAT file systems

GetDataBack for NTFS 4.0
Data recovery software for NTFS file systems

Recuva 1.29.429
Restore deleted files from Hard Drive, Digital Camera Memory Card, usb mp3 player...

Partition Find and Mount 2.3.1
Partition Find and Mount software is designed to find lost or deleted partitions

Unstoppable Copier 4.2
Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors,
scratches or that just give errors when reading data.

funnilly enough i downloaded it for a mate last week didnt keep a copy safe for myself

i just noticed...Partition Find and Mount 2.3.1
Partition Find and Mount software is designed to find lost or deleted partitions

i`ll give it a try tomorrow

thanks

wm

Thanks for the help guys .... ive sorted the problem out

in the end all i had to do was put the hard drive in another pc and scandisk scanned it and replaced all the boot tables and stuff...

once again thanks for trying

WM