[SOLVED] RAW Drive Partition Data Recovery SUCCESS (EASY)

[kewlfox]

So I just had to post this here because I couldn't find this solution anywhere else on the internet (unless I'm not looking hard enough)

Quick backstory, I work at a basic phone/computer repair shop, and I have had a few customers come in with computers that wont boot, upon mounting the hard drive my work PC (windows 10) for data recovery, I find that the main active partition is in RAW format, which Windows cannot read.

Upon google searching for solutions, all I found was article after article from sites trying to make you download their useless software. (its always "do this in CMD, if that doesnt work, download our crappy software that will also not work")

I was on the verge of giving up when I thought, well, lets see what happens on Linux.

Upon booting a portable Linux Mint USB drive, it read the raw drive like any other, and I was able to start transferring the files off of it right away.


I hope this helps



PS. here is the official Linux Mint Installation Guide if anyone needs it
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

 

[fzabkar]

"Raw" means that some metadata in the file system is damaged or missing. Windows then treats the partition as a bunch of bits. In your case the damage was minor, so Linux was able to work around it.

DMDE is a free disc editor that can help you identify any metadata corruption. It can even repair some simple problems which cause the partition to appear as raw.