Chkdsk reports "The type of file system is RAW." etc.

[Guest]

Help!

Running XP Pro w/SP2. C: drive is one physical drive, D: drive is two
physical drives configured as RAID0.

Experienced something that appears to have corrupted something on D: drive.
When I received an error message from XP that I needed to run Chkdsk, I ran
"Chkdsk /f" from the command prompt, and then answered "Yes" to run it at
next boot up. I rebooted, Chkdsk appeared to run OK and ran through all
three stages as XP was booting (although I didn't receive a progress screen).
After the desktop loaded, I had no more warnings in the task bar about
running Chkdsk, but several of my desktop shortcuts (all pointing to the D
drive, where all the games are loaded) reported that they no longer worked
because the directory either no longer existed or was corrupt. The affected
directories (three out of over 20 under "Program Files") are listed, but some
of them can't be accessed.

I can access the D drive just fine, and everything else on the drive appears
to work OK, to include over 20 shortcuts which point to different directories
on that drive.

When I went to run "Chkdsk d: /f", it reports "The type of file system is
RAW. CHKDSK is not availabl for RAW drives."

When I check the status of the disk under properties, it reports that it is
healthy and a NTFS disk. But Chkdsk will not check the disk for errors. I'm
desperate to fix this!

Any ideas? Other Internet research seems to indicate that some of the drive
info may have become corrupt, but that the data is still there and should be
able to be recovered.

Thanks in advance very much for any assistance you can render!

Bob

 

[Guest]

I am replying to my own post to provide additional information about my
original question, in case anyone else encounters the "CHKDSK" problem which
I described below.

I searched the Internet extensively, and could not find an anwer to my
question, other than trying to copy a portion of the FAT to another portion
of the HD at the binary level, which I didn't want to attempt.

Everything that I found on the Internet addressed how to recover lost files,
but not how to fix the HD access/CHKDSK issue.

Since I had no critical data on the below mentioned D drive, I uninstalled
all games from that drive. I encountered problems with the uninstall process
for three games, which led me to belive that there was more corrupt
file/directory issues than what I orignially believed.

I decided to reformat the drive (RAID0, 250GB x 2) using the long process,
not the quick format process. Compression was not enabled. The format
process, started as NTFS, took 2.5 hours to complete, finished at 100%, then
immediatly reported that the formatting had failed. During formatting, the
file structure was listed as NTFS, and the amount of free space was reported
as about 15GB less than the total drive capacity. I clicked on the drive
icon, and was alerted that the drive was not formatted and was given the
option to format. I declined. What the drive was doing for 2.5 hours before
this is beyond me. Note that, in this case, the formatting process was
significantly slowed at the 16, 25, and 30% completion levels, while the
drive activity light changed to always on to intermittant on/off as the drive
appeared to be searching/reading/writing or something else. Each of these
incidents lasted for about 15 minutes, then the constant drive activity light
remained on after each one and the formatting percent continued to increase.
After 30% complete indicated, formatting continued to 100%, and then reported
that it didn't work!

I immediately opened the disk management pane and began the same type format
as before. This time, NTFS was NOT indicated as the file type (the display
was blank), and the amount of free space equaled the drive capacity. The
above mentioned symptoms occurred exactly as before (except that because it
was so late, I went to sleep after 25% completion). Awakening at 0200 hrs, I
checked the status of the formatting, and it was complete and successful. I
immediately ran Diskeeper Professional, it was able to analyze the drive.

I'm still not sure what happened or why, but those are the facts as I
observed them. Hopefully, my observations might help someone else.