Why does a hard disk suddenly look to Windows as if it "needs to be formatted"?

Posted by pufferfish on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by pufferfish
Published on 2010-04-29T12:23:01Z Indexed on 2010/04/29 12:27 UTC
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Filed under:

Windows

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Hardware

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hard-drive

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theory

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data-recovery

This is more of a theory question, but what are the reason(s) for a disk to suddenly cause Windows to start saying it "needs to be formatted"?

It happens to an IDE disk that I have in a cheap external enclosure, and I can usually get most of the data back by using software like recuva. It's now happened to an internal disk I have. I'm not looking for software to fix this (although links would be appreciated), but rather a low-level explanation as to what gets corrupted on the disk.

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