XP Home - Drive Letter Disappeared

Greetings,

I hope someone can shed some light on this issue for me. I recently installed Windows XP Home on a system and everything worked well. I also have a Seagate 500 GB HDD as a slave drive. I had no problems assigning a drive letter (D:\) and mapping it as a network drive. Then yesterday, a Windows error message popped up saying there was "Delayed Write Failure" or something similar. It was at that point the the slave drive became inaccessible. I can still see the drive in My Computer but that is all. I went into disk management and click on properties, it says the file system is "RAW". I have no idea what that means. I then tried using CHKDSK to check the drive for errors in the DOS prompt. But again, nothing happened. I used Seagate Diagnostic tools to scan the drive for errors. There is nothing physically wrong with the drive as it passed all the tests except for the file structure test. It failed that test. My friend mentioned it might be due to cross linked files. But aside from CHKDSK, he doesn't know how to fix it.

I was wondering if anyone has some ideas on what I should do next? I am at the end of my rope, and tried everything I know of. Is my data gone for good? I have some files backed up but not everything. Without being able to access the drive, I can't remember the contents.

Thank you in advance for reading my post and any suggestions you may have.

I use the seagate tools only for copy format ,if I have no GUI or OS running
but I don't think the app you are using supports ntfs only dos and fat
sorry to say but in most cases chkdsk will screw up your system
it has happened with me and my clients about 80% of the time
ckdsk from M$ idea must be if it does not like where a file is (or should be) it writes 0's to the file or erases content

your best bet is to reformat & reinstall the windows again to get rid of of it forever.