Drive D is suddenly "not formatted"

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I am using a Compaq T8000 (purchased in Nov. 2002), running XP-Home Edition.
Drive C has a capacity120GB with file system NTFS. Drive D (an internal
"slave" drive) should have a capacity of 80GB. I also have several external
USB hard drives that I use for backups and storage. Everything worked well
until today. I was using an I/O Magic portable hard disk (Maxtor 7200RPM --
40GB), and I did not notice any problems. However, after I unplugged the
I/O Magic disk, I suddenly could not access my internal Drive D. It says
that Drive D is not formatted. I checked the I/O Magic disk, and I can't
see any problems there -- all my data is still intact. I rebooted, but
still have the same problem -- Drive D is not formatted (and yet I was able
to use it yesterday). I did a search for this problem and found numerous
references to the external disk suddenly not being formatted, but that is
not my problem. The only relationship in my case is that an external disk
was plugged into the USB port immediately before I saw this problem. None
of the sites I read had a solution except to take the computer to a tech
shop to try to retrieve data.

One other point I should mention is that I did have another I/O Magic disk
that suddenly "went bad" some time ago. By that, I mean that it could not
even be formatted. That time, too, I did not know what caused the
problem -- but the problem was related only to that disk and not to my
internal hard drives.

Now, the good news is that I could go ahead and format Drive D myself
because I will not lose any data. I have multiple backups of *everything*
and even alternate disks from home to the office every few weeks to make
sure that I will have a copy even if everything at home were destroyed or
stolen. However, can anyone explain what might have happened to cause this
problem so I can avoid it in the future? And, most important, I would hope
to avoid a similar problem with Drive C.

Thanks,
MaryL


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