Drive Partition missing - or is it?

[duanecwilson]

I have a drive named the F:\ drive that is 320GB. It is one of 4 drives on my system (using Windows XP-Pro). I use it for backup mostly. Lately I got a few weird errors on it. Then, one day it went through the disk verification process (something like that) on start up. It found a few bad sectors, deleted a few indexes, etc. But then, when I tried to navigate to it, I got an error saying the drive is not formatted. Format? Y/N. Of course I said no. So, now I have this F:\ drive with no data on it, supposedly unformatted and the system not even able to tell me how big it is.
Anyway, I thought it was completely dead. I thought to try to find some free software to recover the data (do you know any?). The next day, I thought I might have some spyware on it so I downloaded and ran a full spyware scan. It has been running almost 24 hours (I have almost 1TB total disk space).
The weird thing is that the program (MalwareBytes) is actually scanning the F:\ drive as I speak, and actually displaying all the file names, but I cannot "see" them at all in Windows Explorer! What is going on? If MalwareBytes can see them, why can't Explorer? And what other program could I use maybe to look at these files and copy them before the disk goes entirely bad? (I also don't want to risk further messing this disk and its data up.
Please help - this is my first post in the forum. Thank you.

 

[karling07]

Pop in a copy of knoppix or ubuntu liveCD to determine if this is a windows issue

 

[duanecwilson]

If it is, will the live CD allow me to copy the files?

 

[karling07]

Yep no problem if you have a flash/external drive or a CD burner. I recommend Ubuntu for this, as it comes packaged with every driver known to mankind... lol good luck

 

[duanecwilson]

I believe I once tried Ubuntu or Kubuntu on my machine (AMD processor) and I couldn't see the monitor - I think I tried another, like Fedora and it worked, but I can't remember which one. I guess I'll try them again. Maybe I can re-download Ubuntu again and try it. Thanks again.