When a hard drive is formatted, the file system descriptor is written to the boot sectors of the drive. This tells the operating system what the file system is. Using this file system, it can naturally break things into blocks and files, and give you the view you expect to see, where all the files are listed.
If for some reason this boot sector gets erased or corrupted, the files still exist (they're just 1's and 0's magnetically written to the disk, after all), but the OS has no idea how to tell where one file starts and another ends. It's just a big blob of data.
When clicking on the drive in Windows, it is indicating that the drive isn't formatted because it can't read the boot sector. If you click yes, it will re-write a boot sector with FAT32 or NTFS file system, but it will also remove all files, as you predicted.
What you need to do is restore the bad sector(s).
To do this:
Step One: Open "My Computer", RIGHT click on the bad drive icon, choose "Properties".
Step Two: When that loads, click on the "Tools" tab, then click on the "Check Now" button in the "Error Checking" section.
Step Three: When that little window loads, place a CHECK in BOTH boxes, then click on "Start Now".
Step Four: A message will pop up saying that Error Checking will run after you restart the computer, so......Restart the computer. Error Checking will run automatically after the restart and it locks you out from doing anything until it's finished. It takes a little time to perform the task but after it's finished, it will restart into Windows automatically.
__________________
"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel
|