Dear forum members, I'm in real trouble. My father always told me I should keep dvd backups, but I never listened. Now I realize the truth :( I'm in real trouble... Writing this with lowest morale... The problem is with my external USB harddisk. Its an 80 GB seagate barracuda installed in an external casing and I connect it to my systems thru usb cable. It has 4 partitions, 20 GB each and I have highly crucial data stored on all partitions. Problem : It worked just fine since over 8 months. Right now I found that the partition named G with alias name "COMPAQ" is just not accessible. The format it's showing isn't the original FAT32, but "RAW". The alias name "Compaq" is gone and it's now named as "Local Disk". If you try to access it, it says that the volume is not formatted and asks for formatting it.. enough to shock me and make my heart beat faster... For now, I'm moving all my important data present on the other 3 remaining partitions to my desktop system... Please help and let me know what has gone wrong and what should I do from here... I'm doing thorough research on all fronts and one thing I came to know... and that is.. the "MY RECENT DOCUMENTS" folder shows 2 last recently accessed documents... and they are : G:\.doc ; and G:\..doc Finding this element as above, I suspect if this is some boot virus or something that has overwritten some boot sector defination files that may have their names as .doc and ..doc ... Please tell me if this is the truth.. Please please help me as I'm in true real trouble.. Has already ordered a dvdwriter and now I'm going to take one day out and write all my data on dvds.. Please believe that the data on the affected partition is highly highly strategic and important... Please help me... All my thanks for your help in advance...

Have you tried slaving it 'internally' to your desktop system ? (Before third party recovery) It may not do much, but it's worth the effort. Evaluate your rig's gaming ability

I've seen this 'RAW' thing several times and never have seen a fix. The data is probably all still there and fine. If slaving the drive internally doesn't work, get a file recovery program and use it. I'm sure you can salvage your data that way. Here are some suggestions: Ontrack's 'Easy Recovery Pro' (http://www.ontrack.com) GetDataBack http://www.galcott.com Sorry, I do not check for private messages

I tried Getdataback... and it took over 20 hrs to recover all files... But at last... adding to my despair, though all files have the same file name and extension and I hope the file size too are correct, I can not open ANY file! Even raw text files do not contain any text but some unreadable characters.. The same goes for all html files and everything... None of the exes are executable and none of the pdfs are running! This has been the worst nightmare for me throughout my carrier... Pls someone help me if possible... I've really lost lot of crucial data.. Good people pls help!!