(WinXP Home SP3) Cannot access drive even after remapping letter

[republicofkanto]

I cannot access the second (69 GiB) partition on my main (149 GiB) drive, even after remapping the letter. According to PC Inspector FileRecovery, the partition itself is fine but E: points to null. The Disk Management MMC, however, recognizes E: as pointing to the partition.

Help much?

 

[Smith6612]

Were you able to access the second partition of the drive before you remapped it? Typically the only reason you'd see a file system show up as RAW would be if it had gone corrupt or if the partition was zero'ed out by a program.

 

[whitebus]

If you're using file recovery, i'm assuming you had some problems with the drive. have you repaired the mbr?

 

[republicofkanto]

Smith6612: I was able to access E: when I booted yesterday, but not when I remapped.

whitebus: I have had no problems with this drive up until now.

 

[Smith6612]

Have you tried remapping the drive again to see if this will work? I have seem times in which on some PCs I'll have to manually remap a USB drive after plugging it in, because in My Computer it shows up as RAW and is inaccessible. So, open up the Control Panel, go to Administrative Tools, Computer Management and then Disk Management. Look for the drive that is giving you issues, and remap it to another letter then reboot and see if it is accessible.

 

[zubair12]

remap this drive through windows xp cd will solve the problem

 

[republicofkanto]

Smith6612: I've tried remapping it 6 times, and it still is inaccessible.

zubair12: What is the procecdure? FYI, my XP CD doesn't have the Recovery Console or ASR, and reinstalling is not an option.

 

[Smith6612]

You didn't provide this info, but what does the Computer Management utility state as the file system for this particular partition, or is it RAW as you've stated before?

This is strange as remapping/changing a drive letter caused this. Only time I've ever seen a file system go from whatever to RAW would be if an important part of the file system were out of whack and corrupted (The MFT).

 

[zubair12]

Its very simple go to windows XP setup from boot menu, start windows setup but don`t install windows. Then a menu come asking you to chose a partition to install windows here you can remap your partitions

 

[republicofkanto]

smith6612: Yes, it is RAW. I ran chkdsk the day before and it came back clean.\

zubair12: That's not an option, as I would lose all my data.

 

[Smith6612]

smith6612: Yes, it is RAW. I ran chkdsk the day before and it came back clean.\

zubair12: That's not an option, as I would lose all my data.

Very odd. To me, it sounds like the file system itself on that partition has gone corrupt, so my only suggestion to do now if it shows RAW everywhere is to pull out your recovery software and start recovering files from that partition.

 

[republicofkanto]

I haven't a DVD burner or any storage with enough free space to back up the E: drive, and I have to recover this exact partition nondestructively ASAP.