What flupke01's Problem is:
>> I get an notification saying the drive is
unreadable and has to be
formatted.
The Partition is in
RAW Format and the corresponding Partitiontable is defect, not the $MFT itself.
Either you are pretty familiar with hex and walk down the cluster chains or yo need testdisk to repair the damaged table.
chkdsk would not help as it is unable to correct the table itself at this moment.
TestDisk - Partition Recovery and File Undelete
The reason for the above problem can be found in utilities like TuneUp and Daemontools (virtual drives) as well as antivirussoftware.
regards
Michael