i had xp installed... i booted with win98, the setup program hung, ,
so i rebooted and took ou the cd.. and when winxp started it said a
file was corrupted (HAL.dll)... so i had to reinstall winxp... and now
a bunch of my partitions are UNREADABLE and described as RAW. it wont
let me format it them, it says it cannot be formatted. says 0 space on
the drive

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Request for Question Clarification by hummer-ga on 06 May 2004 11:21 PDT

Hi wrynn,

It is normal to have "a bunch of RAW partitions" when installing XP.
Did you highlight one of them, press enter, choose a file system and
hit enter again? If so, what happened?

Does the following help?

Formatting NTFS/FAT32
"Formatting creates a file-system on the drive, so that an operating
system can write information to it. The XP setup utility performs both
partitioning and formatting. If you are starting with a blank
hard-drive, you will see the disk and the unpartitioned space
available. Highlight the 'unpartitioned space' using the arrow keys
and press 'c' to create a partition. You will be shown the minimum and
maximum amount of space you can allocate to the new partition, and
prompted for an amount in MB. Keep in mind that 1000MB = 1 GB.
For now, use the maximum size, unless you have a specific need for more partitions.
Once you have created your partition(s), you will return to the
original partitioning screen. Note that the previously unformatted
space now appears as 'Partition1 [new (raw)]' and has a drive letter
assigned to it, which should be C: unless you already have a partition
present on another disk. Highlight the new partition and press 'enter'
to begin installing Windows XP onto it.
You will be prompted to format the drive with one of four file
systems: NTFS quick, FAT quick, NTFS, or FAT"
"Choose your desired file system and hit 'enter' The system will now
format the drive."
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1435&page=3

Regards,
hummer

Use Easy Recovery Professional for your data recovery...
http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/

Regards!
--
manel-ga

As far as Iknow windows/DOS writes RAW format when the drive is
corrupted(I had some unreadable diskettes that it considered to be
RAW)
Reformatting can help(maybe from DOS).
Or maybe you'll need the recovery utility working under DOS...