Is your External NTFS (New Technology File System) file system hard drive, which is formatted on MS Windows XP, inaccessible? Is your hard drive displayed as unreadable or corrupted by MS Windows XP? This behavior of Microsoft Windows may occur if the data structure of external hard drive are either damaged or missing. Due to the same, Windows is unable to locate and read NTFS partitions of hard drive. It causes severe data loss and requires

NTFS partition recovery to be sorted out, in case backup is either invalid, not updated, or unavailable.

As a practical example of this behavior, you may be notified by Microsoft Windows operating system that your NTFS hard drive is damaged when you attempt to access it. Furthermore, Windows XP gives you the underwritten error message at the same time:

“<drive name>: is not accessible. The parameter is incorrect.” The problem usually occurs on unbootable NTFS partitions. The file system is shown as RAW when you check properties of affected hard drive. When you apply Chkdsk, command-line disk checking tool in Windows, to check consistency and integrity of hard drive, it gives you the following error:

“The type of the file system is NTFS. Warning! F parameter not specified. Running chkdsk in read only mode. Corrupt master file table. Chkdsk aborted. ”

You can check the drive properties, like Type, Layout, File System, Fault Tolerance, Capacity, and Free Space, using Disk Management. To sort out this behavior and perform NTFS data recovery, you must find out the cause of this issue.

Grounds of the issue

This problem occurs if your hard drive has corrupt MFT (Master File Table), file system, or other metadata structures. Corruption may occur after virus infection, unexpected system shutdown, user errors, and other such reasons.

Solution

To fix the above problem and make your NTFS hard drive accessible, you need to replace the damaged data structures. It is possible only through hard drive formatting.

However, formatting is not a safe way to solve such issues, at it removes all the data from hard drive and needs NTFS file recovery. You can easily recover lost data using third-party applications. The NTFS partition recovery software are specifically designed to scan whole hard drive using advanced techniques and extract all lost data from it. They are incorporated with interactive and self-descriptive graphical user interface.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the best recovery software ever made. It recovers data from NTFS5, NTFS, FAT32, VFAT, FAT16, and FAT12 file system partitions. The software works effectively on Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, 2003, XP, and 2000 operating systems.