I've got a 1TB Samsung hard drive with most of my videos on it and it seems to have failed. Last week it suddenly started displaying as only a 32MB disc with Windows 7 describing the format as RAW.

Any ideas on how I might get at the data on the drive? Windows keeps telling me the drive needs formatting, although I'm not sure if it's referring to the whle drive or just the 32MB which it thinks it is.

Could it be an MBR or boot sector problem which is fixable? Why 32MB - is it just seeing the cache?

I think the drive failed when I was converting a 3 hour VHS video to MPEG - which was quite a bit file, although there should have been room to store it on the drive. I was using a Compro adaptor and Corel VideoStudio to do the job.

Using Windows 7 64 bit.

Any help gratefully received.

Ray D

It does sound like the master book record is corrupt. You might check out: How to use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows

If you have available to you another machine which will handle the disk architecture, slave it to that machine and see what it reports regarding the state of that disk drive. It could be either a disk or controller error.