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External Drive - Files System changed to RAW

Zax63

Illuminator
Zax63
Joined
Oct 26, 2005
Messages
3,096
Location
Philadelphia, PA, USA
I have an external hard drive that can't be read and shows as File System = RAW under Disk Management when it should be NTFS. There is nothing vital on it but it would be nice to be able to recover the data.

I've done some Googling and it seems likely that the partition information has been lost. I've tried a couple of recommended programs, Recuva & Easus Partition Recovery without success. I've seen the suggestion to reformat the drive and then let a file recovery program try to get back the files. I'm willing to try that but not until I've exhausted other possibilities. It's not worth using a recovery service but I would pay up to $50 for software if it had a good chance to work. Anyone have any suggestions?

This is on Win 8.1 system but I do have access to Win 7, XP & Mac OS X 10.7.5 systems. By coincidence I have a blank hard drive arriving today or tomorrow that is larger than the one in question, if that could help in any way. I'm thinking if I have to go the reformat route that I might take a disk image before hand, if possible.
 
I have used the DFSee tool/program in OS/2 and eComStationWP and it, IMHO, is a very complete and reasonably intuitive way get at the guts of a disk. It is available for Windows and the current version is: 12.2, released 23-12-2014.

See: http://www.dfsee.com/

YMMV.
 
Thanks! I'll give it a try.

Things are looking worse than I first thought. I'm using something called Active Partition Recovery right now and it seems to be finding large amounts of bad sectors. From the visual display it gives, maybe 25% of the sectors scanned so far. In 14 hours it's done less than 1% of the 2TB drive. At that rate it will take almost 3 months to complete and that does not include recovery time. I guess I'll give it a few more days and then move on to something else.

Remember folks, backup anything you are even remotely interested in keeping.
 
Zax63 said:
Thanks! I'll give it a try.

Things are looking worse than I first thought. I'm using something called Active Partition Recovery right now and it seems to be finding large amounts of bad sectors. From the visual display it gives, maybe 25% of the sectors scanned so far. In 14 hours it's done less than 1% of the 2TB drive. At that rate it will take almost 3 months to complete and that does not include recovery time. I guess I'll give it a few more days and then move on to something else.

Remember folks, backup anything you are even remotely interested in keeping.
Click to expand...

That many bad sectors looks like a hardware failure of the drive, likely not recoverable. Too bad.
 
Yeah, I was hoping it might have only affected a limited area but I'm not waiting 3 months to find out. I actually stopped the recovery program last night. Just having the drive plugged in was trashing the performance on that computer. It would randomly freeze for a few seconds every few minutes and many programs would take several minutes to start up. I assume anything that tried to read the list of available drives would get caught.

Over the weekend I will set it up on a laptop that isn't doing anything and can just run for weeks to see if anything can be salvaged.

One good thing is I have many external drives and use a cataloging program to keep track of what is where so I actually know what files are gone and can search for other copies.
 
It might be worth removing the hard disk from its current enclosure and trying it in another to rule out the enclosure being at fault.

As for recovering partitions, I have had some success with testdisk.
 
-ouch, TRied this. Disc was non-recoverable even after a pro looked at it as a personal favor. The Kicker? It WAS my backup!. I now run back up across two different discs just to be safe.....

But I agree with the try out a different enclosure first. That saved another drive of mine.
 
I use drive docks instead of enclosures and I have tried it in 3 different docks with the same results. It's good advice though. I've had several WD external drives be unreadable but disassembling them left me with a readable drive.

As of last night I had a recovery program running for 77 hours and it was 58% done doing a "quick scan". As far as I can tell it is finding very little usable data. I won't get a list of files until it is done the scan and then I'd have to pay ~$50 for the software to actually recover anything in excess of 1 GB.

I'm pretty resigned to a total loss at this point.
 
Zax63 said:
I use drive docks instead of enclosures and I have tried it in 3 different docks with the same results. It's good advice though. I've had several WD external drives be unreadable but disassembling them left me with a readable drive.

As of last night I had a recovery program running for 77 hours and it was 58% done doing a "quick scan". As far as I can tell it is finding very little usable data. I won't get a list of files until it is done the scan and then I'd have to pay ~$50 for the software to actually recover anything in excess of 1 GB.

I'm pretty resigned to a total loss at this point.
Click to expand...

Have you tried mounting the drive in a different caddy?
 
The last time I had the same problem it was because it was not plugged in properly. It could be some dirt inside making for a partial connection.

Just a thought.
 
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