To my dismay, Windows Vista detects the hard drive but is unable to read it prompting me to format the drive. After a bit of reading, and trying to access the drive in different ways - I got the following error message.

Disk is unaccessible.
The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

It was impossible for me to let go of all my data and thus, I started looking into ways to recover it.

During the process, I realized that the format of my drive had changed from NTFS to RAW - which was rather strange. Searching through Google on Data Recovery Software, I stumbled upon a neat software called R-Studio. I downloaded its trial version to give it a try.

It took approximately 7 hours for it to scan through my corrupt hard drive - after which I could view all my folder structure & files in the hard drive. You can only preview data or recover upto 64 Kb in the demo version of R-Studio. I tested its recover data tool and was very impressed to see that it managed to recover my data.

I purchased the full version of the software for a worthy price of USD 79.99 - got the license key immediately after making payment and started off recovering my data.

Thanks to R-Studio, I have recovered most of my data - besides some that resided on bad clusters.