I had a HD go whacky on my XP laptop. I could not boot to it.
I took it out and mounted to another laptop via external HD shell thinking no problem, i will pull the data off and just reformat and reinstall.
windows xp couldn't access the boot drive, showed partition unknown.
I looked online and found an open source solution:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
it can fix partitions as well as pull data off the hard drive. right now, i am pulling data off the HD.
just wanted to share with those that might fall into this problem in the future.
bookmark the cgsecurity link....it will save you from pulling your hair out when you realize you don't have an updated backup and all of your data is on that un-accessible partition.
This software also helps to pull of images from a camera flash drive that got corrupted. I have this problem and will be checking it out next.
Fight the oh snap!