My aunt has a hard drive issue where the partition has been lost and the drive is showing up as a raw partition, does anyone have a fix or anything to this?
Right click on my computer, then go to the "Manage" option. From there you can get to disk management and will be able to format and initialise the partition. Just going off the top of my head there, hopefully it's right
Gumbatron's solution is exactly correct, but please note that this will destroy any data on the partition. As it stands, any data is very likely lost anyway, but if you do format the drive, it will be even more completely lost.
Can you give us any more information about what happened? It might help us to give you some better advice if we knew how the problem started.
Whilst it would be worth Googling, to see what free alternatives might be available... you may have to resort to buying a data recovery program such as GetDataBack, if none of those earlier suggestions work
Is the partition the primary c:/ drive with windows on it or is it a different drive with just data on it. If its the latter I might be able to help.
You could use something like Partition Magic to have a look at the disk and partitions. I've used PM quite a few times to recover from situations like this but this was with my old hardware.
It is actually possible to have unassigned the drive letter. If the computer is running Vista, go into disk management, right click on the drive and click on "Change drive letter and paths". It is also easy to do in PM, i don't know about anything else though. I would thing that gparted is fairly easy too, and that is free.
If the partition is showing up as raw then Windows won't be able to assign a drive letter to it AFAIK. As I said I've seen a similar problem to this before and Partition Magic sort of confirmed that somehow my original partition had become encased in a logical extended partition, removing this using PM meant that Windows then recognised the partition and the data on the drive.
