Hard Drive Gone RAW on Windows 10. Any Way to Recover Files?

[Jyrz]

I recently did a clean install of my PC and decided to upgrade to Windows 10. Everything was pretty fine for a while until one of my hard drives became inaccessible and wanted to be reformatted. Of course I didn't want to do that so I looked for a way to fix it and found that running a chkdsk with the fix command worked and I was able to get everything back. A couple days later, the same thing happened but to two of my hard drives. I ran chkdsk on the first and it worked, but when I ran it on the second I got a message saying the hard drive needed to be unmounted first. I did it and then it said, "Volume dismounted. All opened handles to this volume are now invalid. Unable to determine volume version and state. CHKDSK aborted". I then immediately opened Disk Management and found that my drive's File System was now RAW. I'm not sure how this happened but I've been working on a fix all afternoon to no avail. First, I tried using Find and Mount, which couldn't find anything, next I tried using testdisk, which also couldn't find anything, and then I tried some suggested trick to try switching the drive letter, but that also failed. I'm at a loss here and I'm not sure what to do next. I really just don't want to lose this drive as I use it to store my media and documents.

If it's any help, I suspect this happened because of Windows 10's Fast Startup feature, I just upgraded from Windows 7 having skipped Windows 8 which I believe also had this, and it messed with my hard drives which I keep in a Sabrent Hard Drive Docking Station because the Alienware that was given to me by a friend only has space for a single hard drive. When I power off my computer, I then turn off the dock so that my hard drives don't just keep running through the night for no reason. I could be completely wrong, but I hypothesize that because Windows 10 doesn't fully shut off, it expects those drives to be on when the system boots back up and then something goes wrong. I'm really not sure though.

I've got enough space in a different hard drive to move any found files over, I just need some way to get to them. Any help would be appreciated. Please and thank you.

 

[goerk27]

If testdisk is not able to find anything then I guess that the HDD itself is damaged and not only the partitiontable or some blocks.
Download any low-level HDD-Tool (I like to go with MHDD32) and boot from a live medium (for example Ultimate Boot CD).
See if you get any errors or bad blocks. If so, try to repair those first and then try it again with testdisk.

 

[ingtar33]

generally when hard drives need to have chkdsk run on them out of the blue (not crash related) that's the first sign of a dying drive. Doesn't mean the drive will die tomorrow, but it does mean the clock is ticking. Might fail in 2 hours, might fail in 2 years. But generally it probably will happen inside of 6 months.

 

[Jyrz]

generally when hard drives need to have chkdsk run on them out of the blue (not crash related) that's the first sign of a dying drive. Doesn't mean the drive will die tomorrow, but it does mean the clock is ticking. Might fail in 2 hours, might fail in 2 years. But generally it probably will happen inside of 6 months.

Probably, maybe, but I'd like to hope not. That's besides the point, in any case, even if it is going, I'd still like a way to get at the files to save them in some way.

 

[DSzymborski]

generally when hard drives need to have chkdsk run on them out of the blue (not crash related) that's the first sign of a dying drive. Doesn't mean the drive will die tomorrow, but it does mean the clock is ticking. Might fail in 2 hours, might fail in 2 years. But generally it probably will happen inside of 6 months.

Probably, maybe, but I'd like to hope not. That's besides the point, in any case, even if it is going, I'd still like a way to get at the files to save them in some way.

My next step in your position would be to get it in an enclosure and see if I can recover the files on another PC/this PC with another hard drive, using a software recovery solution like Recuva or EaseUS. The less you're actually trying to use that hard drive by booting it up, etc., the more likely you are to recover things. If that doesn't work, you're looking at a data recovery firm, which can be quite pricey.

Sadly, the best way to recover files is to not need to recover them in the first place - a solution for backing up important files is a crucial part of basic PC maintenance, like changing your furnace filter or your car's oil. Data that isn't backed up is temporary.