I had a problem over the weekend with mu Toshiba 2T HD (with as many images, etc - close to my last 20 y3ars of life on that drive)..
It first stated with one sub-folder being corrupted from W'7 point of view..
I decided to ignore this for a moment... and then after some time I shut down the system.
Next day - disaster - the whole HD was inaccessible and possibly corrupted.. and W'7 suggested formatting. Which I refused of course.
I decided to try with my lap running XP Pro...
This time, XP invoked CheckDisk and it suggested disc scan and fix..
After 6 hours of doing it's job, my HD came back on line with (apparently) everything intact (it seems the subfolder that failed in first place has some files missing... but this is not an issue at all).
Anyways... Who wants to upgrade to w'10 ??