Main SSD disk went RAW after chkdsk

[illuvattarr]

I was lately experiencing some BSODs, and when trying to fix it by chkdsk, it looked like my main SSD C: drive went from NTFS to RAW filesystem.

I cannot boot from it anymore and it doesn't recognize Windows. I can only enter the recovery drive and run command prompt.

Is there any way to restore it to NTFS without losing data? Or is there a way to recover all the data, reformat to NTFS and then put all data back?

 

[stdragon]

SSD corruption, or at least, only partial loss of the bitmap table in the NTFS structure. You might want to try and salvage it with Recuva

https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

Warning - do not restore data back to this drive. Take it out, and slave the drive to another machine. Read from it, then write the files to another physical storage medium (like a USB drive or another internal HDD ). You don't want to be writing anymore as it will corrupt it beyond recovery...if any of it's recoverable at all.

Once you've gotten everything you want, and have no need for further recovery, the next step to perform a factory reset on the SSD and then reformat it.

If you have a Samsung SSD, you can do this via the Samsung Magician utility.

 

[illuvattarr]

Thanks for your answer. I have a Kingston SSD.

So I can use Recuva to recover the data and also reformat it back to NTFS? And then put back all my data also with Recuva?

 

[stdragon]

Essentially, yes.

Your goals are of the following order

1. Connect the SSD as a secondary drive to another system.
2. Attempt read-only data recovery, and restore that data to another target drive of your choice (USB external, SATA internal, NAS share, etc).
3. When confident you're finished with the recovery process, proceed to factory reset the SSD (if tools are possible), Then reformat the SSD with NTFS again.
4. Restore your data back to the SSD as you see fit with a manual file copy. Recuva isn't used for that last process, you can do this manually after you've reinstalled Windows back onto the drive.

I mention the SSD factory reset because you can't be 100% confident as to the causality of this issue. For all you know, the NTFS corruption was caused by something physical within the SSD. Also, I'd recommend you perform a RAM test with Memtest86. Bad RAM can cause data corruption mid-flight back to he disk as it's committing write changes to the SSD at the file system level. So chasing the SSD as faulty hardware only might be something of a red herring.

Note: Recuva might not recover all the data, OS, or Applications. At best, you might have to manually pick and choose what data it finds, and what data you want to attempt to recover. So while you might not be able to fix Humpty Dumpty again, at least you've found some pieces to pick up again of value (documents,images, videos, MP3s...etc)

 

[illuvattarr]

I managed to fix it in a simpler way. I booted into the diagnostic version of Windows and ran command prompt. There, I ran 'diskpart' and then 'list volume'. It showed my main SSD suddenly with letter D: in stead of C:. Then I exited and ran command prompt again, and ran this command: chkdsk /r

After about 45minutes, it managed to recover the SSD drive and it showed as NTFS again. After booting into it in safe mode, I was able to restart and everything worked perfectly again, with all my data still there.

For other people reading this solution; this only worked for me because I previously ran chkdsk /r /f /x
And I learned that you should never run /x to your main C drive. So it may not be a solution to all RAW disk problems.

 

[stdragon]

You got lucky, glad it worked out in the end

NTFS keeps two copies of the Master File Table (MFT). Usually a chkdsk /r is enough to recover the volume. But in case both MFT are in fubar state, you're kinda hosed at that point short of data recovery.

Someplace, there was just that one bit of information it needed to recover for you.

There is a God.

 

[illuvattarr]

Indeed there is, thanks for your help anyway!