Error "Disk is not formatted"

[Jer]

Hi, I'm running XP Pro and have a secondary harddrive partitioned as drives
E to I. With some spare time this morning I've tried to establish the source
of a high pitched whine coming from the PC, and to check it was the
secondary disk I removed the power from the disk and booted. Now I've put
the power back to the secondary disk I get the error "The disk in drive E is
not formatted. Do you wish to format it now?" to which I say no. All of the
other drives on the secondary disk are fine, it's just this one (drive E),
which is the first on the disk. System Restore won't recognise any changes
to drive E, and Computer Management sees the partition for E with no file
system and 100% spare capacity. I do have most of the data backed up, so can
do a near-restore, but obviously would just like to get back to where I was
at the beginning of the day, so -
How can I get XP to read the data in my E drive? (with zero threat to the
other drives on the disk).
Thanks for any help, didn't see anything relevant on Google or (quick)
searching here.

 

[Major Malfunction]

Hi, I'm running XP Pro and have a secondary harddrive partitioned as drives
E to I. With some spare time this morning I've tried to establish the source
of a high pitched whine coming from the PC, and to check it was the
secondary disk I removed the power from the disk and booted. Now I've put
the power back to the secondary disk I get the error "The disk in drive E is
not formatted. Do you wish to format it now?" to which I say no. All of the
other drives on the secondary disk are fine, it's just this one (drive E),
which is the first on the disk. System Restore won't recognise any changes
to drive E, and Computer Management sees the partition for E with no file
system and 100% spare capacity. I do have most of the data backed up, so can
do a near-restore, but obviously would just like to get back to where I was
at the beginning of the day, so -
How can I get XP to read the data in my E drive? (with zero threat to the
other drives on the disk).
Thanks for any help, didn't see anything relevant on Google or (quick)
searching here.

Just wondering why you partitioned the disk? I leave drives as one big space
and use directories for organization. You mentioned this is a secondary
drive, not the one with your OS, so I can't think of an advantage to
partitioning the drive.

That said, as long as you have everything backed up, I'd pull the partition
table, reformat the drive as a single entity, create a series of directories
and restore my stuff to the appropriate directories. If you have trouble
during the format phase, I'd consider the possibility of hardware failure.
How old is the drive and is it still under warranty?

 

[Jer]

The disk is just over 2 years old, and I've partitioned it so that different
work goes into different drives ie just for organisation purposes. Can a
drive just 'lose' its file system? And if I reformat through Computer
Management, does the format option refer to just the partition, or the whole
disk that the partition is on?

 

[Malke]

The disk is just over 2 years old, and I've partitioned it so that
different work goes into different drives ie just for organisation
purposes. Can a drive just 'lose' its file system? And if I reformat
through Computer Management, does the format option refer to just the
partition, or the whole disk that the partition is on?

(snippage)

The "high-pitched whine" is certainly not a Good Thing. Of course your
hard drive can lose its file system as it dies. Download a diagnostic
utility from the drive mftr.'s website. You will make a bootable
floppy. Boot with this and thoroughly test the questionable hard drive.
If it fails (as I suspect it will), replace it.

Malke