I have an external hard drive (160 gig)which was using the FAT 32 file format. This drive worked well on both my desktop and laptop until a few days ago. When I tried to access the drive it says now that the drive is RAW and unformatted. This drive was bought to be a safe storage place. It has literally all my work and personal data from over the past 5 yrs. I cannot access anything on it now. PLEASE HELP!

I hope this may benefit you in some way. This thread provides several things you can do to try to salvage a HD or partition that turned raw. i_XpUser

I wouldn't even read the above suggested post. It's full of bad information about FAT32 drives not reading NTFS and vice versa. It's the operating system that does the reading not the hard drive. An XP operating system will read either. Try a good data recovery program. I can recommend Ontrack's 'Easy Recovery Pro' (http://www.ontrack.com)

I had the same problem a couple of years ago. I tried to install Win98SE on my PC but for some reason my computer never liked it, so I aborted. When I got XP up and running again, my other HD turned to RAW. I lost lots of important files including photos because I decided to format. Whatever you do, do not format unless there is no way of retrieving the data. In can be hard/costly getting it back again. Sometimes a simple system restart will resolve the problem, or in your case, unplugging and replugging the HD in. It happened to me again not long ago but a restart fixed it.

I called Ontrack Data Recovery Services. 1-800-752-7557 I used there free trial, found my software and then paid $200 for the software to save data on another drive. I called 8 data recover places. http://support.wdc.com/partners/recovery.asp Easy Recovery Data Recovery http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoverydatarecovery/ Since my data had been mistakenly deleted on a second phycical hard drive, and the drive had not been repartitioned, this software worked wonders. All my data is back 100%.

I had a very similar situation just a few days ago and solved it quickly and easily with Active Partition Recovery http://www.partition-recovery.com/ The question is is your data worth 30 euros ? I may be wrong but it get the feeling it's a problem which arises most often with large drives (137gb+) under FAT32