i've encounter a few problem that people refer to me.. a partition suddenly become a RAW.. the testimonial to this problem from the owner of the laptop or pc is the same.. they use it fine in the morning/ afternoon or whatever time with no problem at all.. shut down normally.. and then later when they power on they cannot boot.. when try to repair that is the shocking part.. there is no file system.. only partition.. i dont know how to explain to the owner and my best explaination is virus.. but is it a virus? is there such virus capable of doing this? there is some case that there are two partition, one have become RAW and one still have file system.. when i test it on another computer and scan it (no virus found what so ever) still have the file system on the other partition.. when back to the original pc or laptop the partition with the file system suddenly become raw too .. i dont think its a hardware failure since after the incident still can format the partition and use it.. so what is it?
Is the partition formatted in FAT/FAT32? Data corruption is common in FAT partitions, especially in the office environment where most users just power off their PCs/notebooks without shutting it down first. Don't think it's a virus since you scanned the rest of your hard drive and found nothing.
NTFS.. the partition just suddenly turn into RAW.. is it a rare data corruption? or is it common? i know that if not properly shutdown in FAT/FAT 32 environment will cause corruption, but can it turn a partition in RAW condition? in most cases the corruption can still be repaired..
Hmm.. That's really odd for NTFS.. Have you tried scanning the platters yet? I don't mean a soft scan, but a thorough scan of the hard drive platter?
It's fairly rare actually I think. That would be fun to look at. A partition table manager might help. You can maybe set it back to NTFS or FAT (whichever was the case.) I don't think it's a virus. Offhand I'd say probably a BIOS bug or hard disk corruption.
You probably have a corrupted primary boot sector. it is sometimes repairable using the Dskprobe.exe tool. as shown here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/247575/EN-US be sure and read the second article link from the first about how it can go wrong, or poke around the KB to find other articles for other O/Ss/combonations
Yea, this also happened to a friend of mine the other day, he had a removable hard disk with 4 partitions, all NTFS. 2 of them turned into RAW and unaccessable. If the above poster's method doesn't work for you, you can try this software called GetDataBack by Runtime Software. It might help you recover the data that is in there.
