hardrive recovery tools?

[xixer]

my windows froze all of a sudden and when reboot, my 2nd hd not show up. ran norton disk doctor and it said "error on hard disk 2 - invalid signature on partition table" and says it can fix it. when i reboot again windows says i need to format the hardrive.
i was wondering if anyone knows what exactly happend to the drive, and if any tools to correct it.

thx.

 

[dclive]

Can you post screenshots of what the errors are and what Windows' Disk Management says about the disk?

 

[xixer]

yah, the msg that norton disk doctor gave me is this
this

and disk management shows
this
which is really weird, because before it crashed it was one big partition. but even the healthy partition i cannot access because the file system for it is "RAW"

 

[geologist]

What was on the drive? Was it data you must have back? If so, I have used two recovery programs for "dead" hard drives, R-Studio and Easy Recovery Professional. ERP was IMO the better of the two programs. I did a raw recovery, where the program reads the disc sector by sector and sorts the data into folders according to file type. It was a pain to sort thorugh the files and it took almost 30 hours, but I got everything back . Then I would try to fix the mbr using the recovery console; you might get lucky.

 

[xixer]

nah, the stuff isnt important, i was interested in knowing why it happened, as this isnt the first time. but anyway, i managed to recover the stuff. thx!

 

[ockky]

be sure to post if your reformat works, this sounds very familiar to what happend to mine, and if so i feel sorry for you because my drive is fvsuked!

check for my post (look for the crying fellow) you might want to read it if your reformat doesn't work.
link to my post