My backup drive changed itself somehow on the 18th of
this month from NTFS to raw. Is there any way to restore
the NTFS sysytem to it without losing all the data I have
stored on it?

I have never run into this problem before so I am
completely stimmied. Does this sort of thing happen often?

I checked and the drive is partitioned but has no file
system designation.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

This happens much more often than it should. I have been able to recover the
files (using 3rd party file recovery software) and then partition and format
the drive for further use.

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard :-)

"Stan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:3f3a01c42aca$b3e02c70$(E-Mail Removed)...
> My backup drive changed itself somehow on the 18th of
> this month from NTFS to raw. Is there any way to restore
> the NTFS sysytem to it without losing all the data I have
> stored on it?
>
> I have never run into this problem before so I am
> completely stimmied. Does this sort of thing happen often?
>
> I checked and the drive is partitioned but has no file
> system designation.
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated

The drive is probably still NTFS, but the master boot record has been
damaged and so XP reports a it as RAW. Options to fix include (a) XP
recovery console, the FIXMBR command, (b) third party partition recovery
software, like Acronis Recovery Expert, (c) manually editting the MBR (not
recommended unless you really know what you are doing).

If you do not mind losing all data, you could use a DOS flopy with fdisk and
format, or use the XP disk managment tool to initialize and format.

"Stan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:3f3a01c42aca$b3e02c70$(E-Mail Removed)...
> My backup drive changed itself somehow on the 18th of
> this month from NTFS to raw. Is there any way to restore
> the NTFS sysytem to it without losing all the data I have
> stored on it?
>
> I have never run into this problem before so I am
> completely stimmied. Does this sort of thing happen often?
>
> I checked and the drive is partitioned but has no file
> system designation.
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated