Drive Is Not Accessible After Changing The Letter

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azovsky

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I recently installed a second hard drive on a new Dimension 9100 running Windows XP Media Center. I was using it on my previous system as C drive and it worked fine. It had a small OS partition and a large one for files, total size 300GB.
It worked fine on the new computer as well until I tried to change the drive's letter. Before the change it had two letters assigned to it's two partitions: E and F. Letter D was assigned to cd burner. I needed letter D assigned to F partition so using computer management I changed cd burner's letter to X so D is available, and changed partition F to D. After the letters were changed I was not able to access the 'new' D partition. The second partition remained as E and is fully accessible. I tried reinstalling the drive several times. Finally I reinstalled the OS thinking that that would fix the problem. Unfortunately the problem is still there.
When I dbl click on the drive it tells me that the drive is not formatted. In properties instead of NTFS it shows RAW and no other info. I really thought that the problem was with Windows for some reason not recognizing the drive but it seems like somehow the file system on the drive got corrupted? But how? By just changing the letter? One thing I just remebered was that I accidentaly had a folder open on the drive that I was changing the letter for. Could this be the reason? I'm clueless here.
Please help me find the solution. I was thinking about using one of the data recovery programs but that would be my last choice since I've heard that people end up loosing all of their data or some of it using these progs. I really hope that there's another way to fix this problem. I appreciate your help.
 
Well it all depends on how you changed the letter. In the end if you did it incorrectly, and it looks like you did, then your going to have to format it and start over. You can try recovery tools, but I dont believe that it will do you any good. If this is an extra partition you can format it within windows. Just right click on my computer and go to disk managment. From there you can scan and format the drive from RAW data to usable. Hope this helps.
 
Thanks for a quick response. I hope you understand that formatting the drive and loosing 300GB of data is not an option. I really hope to hear from someone who knows how to fix this
 
OK well if windows is showing it as RAW data, then it has already partilly started a format, and probably can't be recovered. Just an FYI. I do understand about 300 gigs of data loss. I would hate to loose even 60 gigs of data 300 is unthinkable. I would try everything you can as well. I'll do some research for you and see if I can't find another solution.
 
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