Hi,

When I plug my Western Digital 500 GB Passport disk in my Windows machine, it says "not formatted, do you want to format it" something. I started having this problem after I put it in an old desktop at home. I don't exactly know what went wrong. May be partition table is corrupted etc. Questions:

Some quick search on internet tells me there are partition fixing utilities, which can fix corrupted partition table. testdisk being one of such utiities. I can understand how to use this to copy files from the disk to some other location, but I would like to fix the partition table in-place so that I don't have to temporary move around my data of approx size 300GB, then format passport disk and then again bring back the data. Is there any way I can fix the partition table in-place?

Also, how to know which file system was there originally in the disk? Can I only keep the same file system?

My current laptop is running Windows 7. Earlier I used to use Windows Vista. My other laptop has Windows XP. So I have access to Windows 7 and Windows XP.

Please help!

Thanks,