XP Professional no longer sees drive as valid drive

[routerjunky]

My son's was playing a game called everquest which crashed to desktop. When I investigated I found XP sees the F: drive, but believes it needs to be formatted. F: is also where the game is installed.

I ran a virus scan on the system and it found no virus. At this point i thought i had a bad HD. I booted up the system with a start up disk and verified which HD it was. It is the third partion of drive 1.

Out of curiosity I switched to F: and it appears the data is still there. I was able to view file listings on the drive.

Any ideas on how this happened? or how to recover from it?

 

[gargouille]

No, I couldn't explain it...but if it demands a lot of paging you might wanta' give it its own pagefile on the partition to see if it helps.
This is a classic example, tho, of why some apps do better on their own partition...when things go south, you just format and reinstall the stuff there.
Had it been on a Windows partition, woulda' hosed the whole system.
I came to computers thru CAD, and learned way back in DOS daze the idea of a separate partition for apps and one for mainly the OS...because of corruption brought on by the apps.

 

[nhidalgo]

You could try scheduling scan disk to run at boot on your system drive and your F drive.
Nick

 

[linney]

See if there is any help via Disk Management by searching for "Volume status descriptions" in Help and Support program.

 

[routerjunky]

Thanks for the tips folks.

Scandisk found directory structure and free space errors. Volume status description showed healthy with no substatus info, also under filesystem it was blank. Free space 100%.

I ended up pulling the data files off the F: drive via dos. Reformatted the drive and re-installed the game.