When you try to access data from your external Windows hard drive, you may fail to do that. The drive may report errors in disk check software and Windows utilities (viz. Disk Management and Checkdisk). When you see the drive using Windows Explorer, it shows the drive as RAW with 0 bytes of data and 0 bytes of free space on it.
When you perform error checking using the hard drive properties, it does not really help. The hard drive becomes visible in the explorer only after you click on "Safely Remove Hardware" option in the system tray.
When you use Windows chkdsk utility to repair the affected hard drive, the operation may not complete and you may encounter the following error message:
"Cannot open the volume for direct access."
This entire behavior ultimately leads to data inaccessibility and your precious files may go missing from your external hard drive.
Cause
You may experience this behavior of Windows hard dive because of corruption to the partiion table. Due to the same, Windows can not locate the hard drive partitions and thus the data can not be accessed.
Partition Table is a Windows system file that contains critical information about the hard drive partitions. It stores start point and end point of a partition, file system, name of partitions, size and other important information.
No matter what the cause of this issue is, the ultimate result would be the loss of hard drive partitions and valuable data stored on them. To overcome this problem, you need to go for partition recovery so that you can get your precious data back.
Partition Recovery is the process of scanning the affected physical hard drive, locating the lost partitions and then retrieving them. In order to have trouble-free, quick and safe Partition Recovery, you should go for a powerful and advanced Partition Recovery Software.
Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the most commading and result-oriented Partition Recovery Software that offers true Partition Recovery in all logical data loss situations. It supports Partition Recovery from FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, NTFS and NTFS5 file system based Windows partitions. Phoenix Windows partition recovery software is compatible with the latest updated versions of Windows Vista, XP, 2003 and 2000.
About the Author:
Shally Spears is a freelancer for Stellar which offers file recovery software and file recovery programs for different OS and file system