Seagate drive changed from NTFS to raw

[strategery320]

I bought a new Seagate internal 3TB esata drive. I plug it into a Thermaltake BlacX dual external esata dock. The Thermaltake is connected to my computer using esata cable. The computer is a Dell XPS 8300, Windows Home Premium 7 64 bit.

I loaded the drive with media files...used it for a couple weeks...no problems. Today I copied new files to the drive. I then rebooted the computer with no errors or problems. The esata drive suddenly shows as FAT....with NO DATA. I am in a panic. What happened I do not know...but HOW CAN I RECOVER THE DATA. The drive has about 2.5 TB on it. Please help!!!!

 

[drtweak]

I've seen issues like this.

1) Does it show the full size of the hard drive in windows? If it does go to 2) If not go to 3)

2) Download and install this

http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/

and run the Partition Recovery Wizard. Please note that before you click the Next button to recover the partition it MUST Search the hard drive! You see see the green progress bar move across. Once its 100% it will show your solutions and see if you can recover the partition.

If not try running the data recovery see if you can at least recovery your data.

3) If its not showing all the hard drive space (have an issue with a clients 3Tb Backup drive and sometimes it will show as a 768GB Raw or something similar in size. I have to yank it out, find a PC that can properly read the whole size, back everything up, erase all partitions, take it back to the server where it will not see the whole 3Tb and then format it on there and restore.

the 4th option is that something happened when you plugged it into the dock. I have had similar issues as well. had to recovery everything.

 

[strategery320]

Thank you for the response. When you look at the drive in Disc Management it shows as RAW, Healthy, FUll Size 3TB, and 100% free space.

Q: If I use easeus recovery..does this change or save anything to the drive? I have used recovery programs in other situations and if they find the data and it is recoverable...they only give you ONE chance to back it up...then the disc and data is unusable.

Is there a way to mirror this drive so that I may try to recover the data from the mirror without damaging the original drive?

 

[drtweak]

You would need to use something like CloneZilla or better yet Data Rescue DD BUT you need a hard drive that is the same size or bigger to image it to. Clonezilla i don't know if it will clone Raw. Data Rescuse DD make a Bit by Bit image of the drive of every single bit which is why you need a drive bigger than the drive (The drive size +a few megs of overhead for the program) and then you can run mount, run scans, ect on the image itself. Only thing is i have still yet to find a program that will allow me to take that .dd image file and image it BACK to a hard drive is ever needed. It's mainly meant for failing hard drive because the more you scan on the drive it self the sooner it can die so you make a bit by bit image of it, and then run recovery programs off the image leaving the physical drive instact and hopefully good still just incase.

The program i sent you will actually read the entire drive, look for lost partitions, and recover them.

Now i won't like this doesn't always give a 100% success rate of all the files to be recovered.

So my question is if you have an extra hard drive that can fit the amount of data you had on the drive i do a data recovery first and recover the data to the other drive. THIS DOES NOT MAKE THE OLD HARD DRIVE UNREADABLE FOR FUTURE RECOVERY. Even recovering the partition and not all the files are there, the missing files can most likely still be recovered. But again its not always a 100% success rate.