My FAT32 secondary HDD has changed file system to RAW. It says I have 0 bytes of data saved, free and capacity of 0 bytes. When I click on the drive, it tells me disk is not formatted and if I want to format it now. Windows recognizes it as WD Caviar and has proper support from the O/S until about a week ago when I left it to idle, then it froze and I restarted and it gave me this problem. The HDD is a Western Digital 200gb and I would like to recover the data. Had only about 13gb saved. Mainly the personal files concern me most but the most the better. I would prefer freeware but I'd settle with whatever helps me. Thank you.

Go to the Western Digital web site and download their free hard-drive diag. software and put it on a floppy. Boot up your bad PC with it (make sure in the BIOS that your booting into the floppy first). When you get into it, do a complete test and check the results.

Do that test and try GETDATABACK.It will recover data from a drive even after FDISK.

I don't think any 'free' recovery utility will be able to recover any data. Basically, your FAT (File Allocation Table) has been lost meaning all the data on the disk has no memory address. It's there, but the address to it is gone, so Windows will never know where the beginning to end of each file is. I think you could get it recovered by a professional HD recovery place, but I'm not sure. You file system is RAW, that's how HD's come when there new. The drive is theoretically, completely empty. You'll have to reformat it in order to use it again normally. I should know, it happened to me once, I lost loads of files (including personal) but I managed to recover some of it from backups made in the past but still some more important things where lost. Now, I won't hesitate to backup.

Well, I've tried to use the WD diagnostic tool but that was when I purchased the HD to do a low-level format. I'm just cautious about because I don't understand how the GETBACKDATA will work. Will it randomly retrieve data and store it anywhere? I'm just not certain what its effect might be because with Murphy's law, the useless stuff will survive and the important stuff will be gone.

I have the same exact problem. My ex Fat file format HD running under Win98 has become a RAW file format... It is a Quatum Fireball Lct 15Gig. I see it under Bios and Win XP. I need to get my files back !!!

WinXP and the RAW file system do not play nicely with one another. I work in a college computer lab and see this problem all the time. For HD we normally just reformat them, and reinstall. But for floppy disks we normally copy the data off to a Win98 machine because 98 for some reason recognizes the data easier. We have found that if you copy the data to a 98 machine, then format the floppy as fat on a XP machine, and copy the data back, it normally has no more problems. Hope this helps you a little bit.