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.