Hi all,

Here is the situation:
Yesterday i went to my friends house with a hard drive that worked fine on windows. During i was there my friend put some things onto my hard drive in linux. I noticed before he could, he typed alot of code in to do with the ntfs file system on the hard drive.

This morning, when i got up and plugged my hard drive in, windows now can't read it and i get the following error message when I try to acces it:

J:/ is not acessible.

The file or directory is corrupted or unreadable.

After seeing this i thought 'Hmm, he asked me to do check disk a few times in command propmt in windows so i'll do that and see if that helps'. It seemed to read the disk fine but had no effect to the fact that windows doesn't want to read it.

Next i went into the disk managment part of admin tools and saw that is says my hard drive is RAW instead of NTFS. Could this be the source of the problem, and if so, can i fix it in windows, or will i need to download linux to fix it?

Thanks for your time,
Zendithos

hmmz sounds like your mate has b0rked the file system, as when a drive is unformatted it will show up in disk management as raw and as windows doesnt rcognize linux file system it could be that he's inadvertantly (mistake) changed it to linux file system thereby as far as i know makin ur data on the hdd unrecoverable.
best thing to do is go around and slap your mate and tell him to undo the changes, if he thought he knew enuff to do what he did he can be just as confident undoing it. but really im just a linux user, im no sysad, so it may be that someone comes on l8r who will just tell me i talk ****

hi pBiggi,
As annoying as it is, i guess that makes sense. I will go round there again and get him to fix and test it before i leave this time. Not to sure about the slap though :P

Thanks for the help,
Zendithos

Hi Zendithos

pBiggi has a point, any writing to an NTFS drive has the potential to damage the file system. One question though, do you have Service Pack 2 installed on your system. I've had simialr problems after reinstalling windows and my second partition would give me the same error until I installed SP2 and then I would have to simply take ownership of my files before I could access them. Just a long shot really.

After visting my friend, it worked on his vesion of windows xp, but on vista, it doesn't work. Could this be vista's fault? Why did it work fine before and not now?

had a bit more research into this and i think that vista NTFS is slightly different from xp NTFS, it could be that as your m8 was doin this in linux he didnt have the correct commands to do whatever he did to a vista NTFS. just get him to copy all your files onto his windows xp pc then take yours back to vista and format it in vista before taking it back to your m8 and getting all your files back (slap him if he offers to do any 'non-standard' stuff)