There I was, minding my own business, when my system froze. I hit the reset button, and upon restart, I was informed that my "E" drive was not formatted. My "D" and "E" are on the same physical drive, so I know the hardware didn't crash, because "D" is still recognized and operable. Nothing vital exists on "E"; just my newsreader, and all its .dat files, and my preferences and whatnot. But I'd still hate to lose it, as setting it all up in the first place was a PITA, not to mention that there'd be a lot of catching-up to do. The device manager shows "E" as existing, but not formatted. The DOS prompt shows "E" as existing, but not formatted. System restore warns that (paraphrasing) "changes to the "E" drive will not be reversible; the drive has been removed from the system", (so I chose not to do a restore to an earlier date). I've unplugged and replugged, I've rebooted several times, I've consulted computing.net. Are there any wizards out there willing to tackle the problem of getting my "E" drive to work long enough for me to transfer all that crap over to my barely-used 300 gig "C" drive?

You need to be thinking about data recovery. There are any number of data recovery tools, Even one advertised in the orange square above-right. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

try win-hex http://www.x-ways.net/winhex/ Today's subliminal thought is: 'Calm down ... it's only ones and zeros.' icq 10183575

Go to the help file and read up on how to run CHKDSK/R to a secondary disk from the recovery console.

If all else fails, you coud try test disk. This what they say about test disk. TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting your Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

I wonder if you try fixboot E:, if that would help you out.

This is curious, I have the same problem with my wife's D drive today. Now says it's not formatted??