RAW hard drive recovery

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clowry

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Feb 27, 2012
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I'm a long time reader, but first time poster. Here's my problem:

Both my and my girlfriend's old laptops recently died so we bought a new desktop. I purchased an external hard drive case to connect the hard drives via USB. I was able to save all of my girlfriend's files without any issues. Mine however is not going so smoothly.

I searched the forums and found 2 relevant posts (i'll link to them at the bottom) that I believe have put me on the right path, but I need some help going from there. Through disk management I've discovered that the problem drive, I:, is in the RAW format. I have windows 7 64bit. I was able to get into bootrec.exe but wasn't sure what to go from there. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that I want to use the /FixMbr option, but I'm not sure how exactly to do that. Obviously I would rather fix this without having to purchase any software.

I just need a little guidance about what next.

Thanks!


http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/257868-32-external-hard-drive-inaccessible
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/278914-32-recover-drive-format
 

clowry

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I tried re-writing the partitions using this program but the drive still kept registering as RAW after re-start. I tried restarting the pc, disconnecting and reconnecting the USB it's connected through and no success.

The program did find the files though. It gives you the option to copy files so I'm trying to copy the whole drive onto an empty one on the desktop. I'll let you know if it works.
 

clowry

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I was able to copy the whole hard drive to an empty one, and it worked for the most part. It took a LONG time though. I had to leave it running all night and through the next morning. I did notice that some files got lost in the transition though. I had about 4500 songs on itunes and only about 4200 got copied. I will try copying just the music folders and hopefully that will work. All in all I feel like I lucked out.

Now, once I am confident I salvaged everything I would like to convert the old hard drive into an external. It was originally a HP computer and they configured it to have the main C:/ drive as well as a small (10 gigs) "recovery" drive D:/

How do I reformat both drives into a single drive for an external backup?
 
You can delete all the partitions on the old drive so that you have just one whole raw drive. Then you make a single patition and format it and your done.
When you have a hard drive of say 1tb you can make several partitions it you want to and each partition is treated like a seperate drive , then once you remove those partitions you are back to the one single drive of 1tb in the raw unallocated state.
 

pixanwosi

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Mar 6, 2012
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Glad that you got your raw drive recovered.

TestDisk is useful utility and it works excellent if you are pro on DOS command.

If you want to restore files off raw disk, you can use freeware to do the job.

http://www.recoverdeletedfile.info/
 

rawproblemsector

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Dec 12, 2012
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You are so lucky that you've got your RAW drive recovered. I am lucky, too.
To be honest, I had got a RAW drive last weekend anyhow. It was just like a thunder in the fine day, for it held a great number of my important files.
But after searching it on the internet and reading some related threads, I had learned that I needed to recover them back at first and then formatted this RAW drive to make it workable.
I still remembered I selected a free recovery program, which was really free and efficient. It completely recovered all of my needed files. Just like a miracle.
Am I lucky?
 

rawdrivekillsme

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Jan 6, 2013
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My data was lost while trying to recover from a blue screen of death and disk partition became RAW when checking its file system. I connected the disk to another PC, it reports not formatted and says: the disk in drive F is not formatted, do you want to format it now?

I searched the net for raw recovery and came to this page. Download this software and my godness, all my files like 95% of them are there.

Thank you for your instruction.
 

sti4life06

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Feb 15, 2013
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Looks like that ICare software cost money after the 10th file recovery. Im just trying to recover a partition so hopefully it won't ask me to pay for anything. But dang it is going to take forever to scan all the sectors! It says 112hrs :(
 

Morefish2

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Feb 17, 2013
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There must be bad blocks on your disk. Usually it takes 12 hours is enough for a 2TB drive scanning. I tried this program and it said 89 hours left after running 5 hours. I emailed the support and they said it is recommended to cancel the scanning after 12 hours.

I am still glad since 80% of lost photos and important backup files are still found.
 

hyde_NYC

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Feb 20, 2013
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Hi Everyone,
I am trying to recover an external SATA drive that has gone RAW suddenly (without even being removed).
testdisk_win was able to list all drive contents.
It is taking forever to recover my video files. After over 12 hrs, I got only maybe 2,5 GB out of 250GB.

Would anyone suggest I go ahead and just try to rebuild the partition? What step should I take? I really don't want to lose my collection, but waiting days and days is not the answer (I am trying to copy from ext SATA to ext USB3, this may be why it is slower).

Thanks in advance.
 

bettyharven

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Apr 9, 2013
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Hi,
You can try to connect the hard disk to a new (spare) computer and boot - if the disk is not damaged, it should work. To get a network connection you should edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules, because of renaming from ethx.

If the system don't boot, use an rescue-live-cd like grml. If you connect the oldd disks to the new server you have two different volume groups with the same name (pve)!

See more details at http://www.transfer-iphone-recovery.com/data-recovery-tutorials.html
 

Defnestor

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Aug 4, 2013
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Thanks for the malware a-hole
 

dmlive

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Sep 11, 2013
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I tried several programs, ultimately the only one that worked at all was iCare Partition Recovery. Managed to recover the entire partition and all it's contents when all other program failed. Couldn't believe it. Dodged a bullet on that one! The drive had been working perfectly then all of a sudden the next day the whole Windows 7 system was running slowly. The particular drive was set as a slave drive/second drive and crashed out somehow or another with the drive partition missing, and the file format saying RAW. iCare recovered it all.

http://icare-recovery.com/partition-recovery.html

I found the link here and wanted to just reiterate that it did work for me brilliantly.
 

vuiken123

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Oct 3, 2013
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umm can i ask from this forum i actually have got RAW drive problem i already test many software to get my external hard disk to fix but it still like that
the problem is like this

my external hard disk is seagate expansion 500GB
it was RAW and when format pop up come when window detected i click to format but it not useful because it get error that i haven't plugged in external hard disk but when i check my hard disk is already plugged and i try using recover my data application it can't detect my file inside my hard disk even using testdisk i try to search at win 7 before searching it it didn't display the partition inside the drive and when searching it the read error is increasing i try parted magic (linux live CD) and using it testdisk it can saw the partition but when i using the quick search i already found my file in it and i kinda blank on it since i first try the linux system so how i can fix my external hard disk i need to get the program (it something like voice synthesizer) inside my external hard disk that become RAW
 
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