Hard drive has lost file system.

[Guest]

Hello,

I am using Windows XP SP2. Recently my second hard drive appeared to lose
all its data. It still shows as a drive, but is now called "Local Disk"
rather than the name it had previously. I am unable to run chkdsk on it. It
was in FAT32 format previously but now it says there is no file system on
there, or occasionally I get a message that Windows cannot access it because
it is a RAW volume.

I ran Diskpart and it showed as a volume with no file system, but it was
described as "healthy" It is a Maxtor 20GB hard drive. I don't want to have
to reformat if I can recover the data some other way.

My main hard drive is a 160GB drive split into two NTFS partitions, and does
not appear to be affected.

Windows has been running incredibly s l o w l y for a few days but I
don't know if the drive went blank first or afterwards. Norton Antivirus,
Microsoft Defender and Ad aware have found nothing untoward so far. A recent
repair installation and defrag did not improve the speed of Windows either,
so I am trying to get to the bottom of that too.

Any help gratefully received.

Thanks.

Mark L.

 

[Ron Badour]

I had this happen recently on my wife's PC and I was not able to find a
reason why nor a fix. I resorted to recovery software to retrieve the files
I (she) needed.

 

[dreamboy.genius]

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