Harddrive recovery?

I have a 500GB external USB harddrive, been using it for several months. There's less than 100Gb of free space left on it.

Last night, I turned off my laptop for the night (the harddrive also turns off automatically), since I was playing a game. I don't usually turn my laptop off, because I'm usually always downloading something.

So I turn on the laptop this morning, and it asks "The Disk in Drive * is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?"

I was not impressed.

Checking the File System of it, it says that it is 'RAW' (instead of NTFS or FAT).

Any ideas on what may have happened, and if I can recover the data on the drive in any way before formatting? I have only had the drive for a few months, but I have 3 or so years worth of pictures, programs, and mostly Anime on there. Sigh.

Have you tried removing the disk then reconnecting the USB/Firewire cable with Windows open to see if it re-recognises it, or tried the disk on another computer? I'd also boot a linux liveCD like Knoppix to see what that makes of the disk too :p Though unlikely these days, it could also have been the work of a virus :p

On the bright side, anime is the easiest to recover since there's so many places to redownload it from, and probably in higher quality this time round :D

I haven't had a chance to try it on another computer yet, as I had to leave for work shortly after discovering this issue. I did unplug it and re-insert it a few times, both the USB cable and the device's power supply. Only shows up as 'Local Disk' that needs to be formatted.

I don't know if I want to re-download 350 GBs of anime :P A lot of it is on DVD now, but some of them aren't worth the DVD purchase anyway. Plus, I haven't even watched a lot of it, I was storing up for a trip I'm taking soon.

I've heard of some software that can restore deleted files and whatnot, I'm gonna research that when I get back home in a couple of hours.

So I start browsing some sites for a replacement 500GB harddrive, and I came across this on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digita...&s=electronics

500 GBs for $200 is a great deal, just thought I'd pass it along if anyone else was in the market for a higher capacity drive.

I got it working again. This is the magic program that fixed it.

http://www.ptdd.com/

A couple of clicks and a few seconds later, my harddrive was working like nothing happened. Nothing seems to be missing, everything is peachy. Definitely check it out and keep the demo version safe, just in case your harddrive conks out.

I like this program so much, I think I'll pay for it...next time...