hi.
i think i've lost the header to one of my internal disks. this is a storage only disk, and contains no software but regularly accessed files. after a system reboot, the disk name was magically reset to 'local disk', and the file system changed from ntfs to raw. whenever i try to access the disk in any way, windows simply prompts me to format the disk. i have tried to diagnose the disk in norton disk doctor, only to be told that the disk contains no recognisable format. is there a convenient way to recover the disk header or do i have to recover the data to a secondary location using recovery software? i'd rather not have to resort to the latter, as there is about 100gb of data and i don't have the room on my system.

:computer_

Welcome to PCHF janimal

Tricky one this. How badly do you need to keep the data on the disk? Is it backed up?

Here is a program that might be able to do both. Also what is the manufacturer fo your hard drive?

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/fil...2917&fileidx=1

hi. the disk is a maxtor 160gb. foolishly, the data is not backed up (waiting till i can afford a server), so one way or another i want to recover it. i've tried the disk investigator app, but it pretty much just tells me there's nothing on the disk. should i try to create a disk image before i continue???

someone on another forum recommended trying fdisk /mbr in dos mode but this seems to have had no effect. is there some software that can sort this within windows, as its not the os drive which is down? i have disk warrior and disk mechanic but can't see how to use them to fix this.

i bit the bullet in the end and bought another disk to recover the data to.
stellar phoenix crashed every time i tried to scan the disk, ontrack found all
the data, but none of the volume or file names (nice), but r-studio did the deed and successfully recovered the entire directory structure and around 99.8% of the files.