Partition smaller than volume

[gillo_100]

Hey, new linux user here, so far so not too bad.
Anyway I have a problem accessing one of my drives.

Basically I have a 160gb drive and a 1tb drive. OS's and apps are on the smaller one, which has a couple of partitions including a /windows one as I dual boot with XP.

Anyway the problem is with the other drive, basically I can no longer access it. I originally installed drive before I had linux and its is formatted NTFS.

However I can no longer access it either from windows (Error message that drive not formatted do I want to format) or linux (distro is Mint btw). I was originally able to access from linux but had some trouble with grub, since that is sorted I can not longer use it.

When I try to mount volume I get error than could not read last sector. Also if I check drive information in gparted it states:

Warning:
ntfsresize v2.0.0 (libntfs 10:0:0)
Device name :/dev/sdb1
NTFS volume version: 3.1
Cluster size :4096 bytes
Current volume size: 1000204849664 bytes (1000205 MB)
Current device size: 1000203805184 bytes (1000204 MB)
ERROR: Current NTFS volume size is bigger than the device size!
Corrupt partition table or incorrect device partitioning?

Unable to read the contents of this file system!
Because of this some operation may be unavailable

Obviously this doesn't make any sense, from what I have read I probably need a partition recovery tool.

Any suggestions as to what to do or for a open source recovery tool would be greatly appreciated, as I would prefer not to have to format and lose everything on the drive.

Thanks in advance

[Lostfarmer]

Try 'testdisk', can download versions for Dos/Windows/Linux. It is also included on some live linux cd's. Be sure to read the How-To use first. I do not currently have the web site but a search will turn it up.

[gillo_100]

Thanks, that seems to have done the trick.

Tbh not even too sure what it did but I now have access from both linux and XP,
Cheers