So the scenario of course is simple – you’re working along on your computer with some sort of hard drive (in this case, external) and you decide to do something with said hard drive that somehow screws up your partition table.

For me, I had an NTFS formatted 500gb external hard drive with all my data collected on it. What made it not work is still beyond me, but one day when I came into to work, I plugged it in to my Vista work computer. It usually took a minute or two to appear and so I did other things to occupy the time. By the time I returned to look for my drive, I still could not see a drive letter. Strange.

Turning it on and off did not help the situation and plugging it into a different USB socket didn’t solve the problem either. I decided to look into the Device Manager. It showed up. Strange.

So then I decided to go over and look at the storage devices part of computer management admin tools. It showed up there, too. But instead of reading it as NTFS, the computer I had read it as RAW format. Strange.

Testing on a couple of different other computers at work showed the same result – it seemed that the hard drive partition table was in some way corrupt, and I’m not exactly sure what caused it.

Well, luckily I found a nice free partition repair tool (download link on bottom of page) that was simple and straightforward, though the user interface could have been a little nicer with remembering options. But, with the help of Google to search for the number of sectors my particular drive had, and the tutorial on the page, I managed to fix the table cleanly, without losing any precious data, and without having to invest time and energy into recovering files manually, one at a time.

Thankfully though, it was only the partition table this time and not some hardware malfunction like my last drive.