So, IF the repair appears to have worked and all your stuff it there, I suggest you do a couple more things before relying on it. But is i still possible that the drive has other problems, even if the repair appears to work. Very commonly with a RAW drive, the only problem is a small corruption of data in the unit's "housekeeping" area and that is what the last step of that outline repairs. The outline does not mention this, but I'll suggest it. BUT if this last step does work, all your old data will be directly accessible on the "fixed" old drive and you won't have to copy it all back from the second drive. This step is NOT guaranteed to work flawlessly, and that is why it is so important to do the first steps of copying all data to another drive for safe backup. After that data is safe, the fourth step will attempt to correct the corrupted few bits of data on the troubled drive and make it work as a normal NTFS-formatted drive WITHOUT losing all the old data.
First three steps outline how to find and recover all the data you can't "see" and save that to a second drive. You will note it does both important processes.
Which outlines use of their software to recover from a RAW drive. Raw Disk Definition: "The term raw disk refers to the accessing of the data on a hard disk drive (HDD) or other disk storage device or media directly at the individual byte level instead of through its filesystem as is usually done".Ħ Reasons & Solutions when Disk Partition Becomes RAWĪnd searched for "RAW format". See other possible solutions in the page. try that and if it doesn't help, run a chkdsk /r either from the Partition Manager or from the Windows File Manager. If the Windows Disk Manager can detect the HDD, and if it is not to badly damaged, all you have to do is add a drive letter from the Windows Disk Manager so the disk/partition can be accessed and data becomes readable. so use the Data Recovery feature on Minitool Partition Wizard and next if necessary, run the Disk Check. The partition managers I initially sugested have data recovery capabilities. I'm guessing not because your post tittle is "RAW Hard Drive", that should be detected as a single partition. If a partition manager did not find partitions, was the HDD partitioned to begin with?. And being so, a data recovery application should offer the solution if the HDD is not damaged beyond recovery. it is data on the HD that is not being detected. So if or not the HDD was partitioned, the issue has little to do with that. Raw format usually means the data on the disk, partition or partitions can't be read. I'm wondering as it's in RAW format it won't show any partitions? Really struggling to get it out of RAW format.
The software has NOT written anything to the troubled HDD, so it is untouched and free to try another recovery tool on it.Ĭheers for the info! I've tried to scan the partitions however nothing has come up.
BUT if you don't think it is able to do the full job, you do NOT pay anything and back out. If it has, you can then PAY for it to get the license, and it WILL copy all the recoverable stuff to that spare HDD. Instead, it will do all the recovery it can, then let you examine all the directories and even the contents of files so that you can decide if it really has found EVERYTHING you need to recover.
You can download and run a "full version" that will NOT let you save the stuff. Some of these offer free versions that often are limited to recovering only a limited amount of data, OR you can buy the full versions. That releases the second drive unit for re-use.Īnd a recent multi-product review summary AFTER that is all done, you work to wipe off the old drive and make sure it is still good, then you copy all that recovered data back onto it. To avoid possibly corrupting files on the old drive, these tools will NOT write to that drive - they only will READ, and then place the recovered data on a different good drive. Virtually ALL of the good ones require that you have a spare HDD connected with enough space to hold copies of ALL of the data from the troubled drive. There are freebees on the market, and pay-for-me types.
Most often the actual data all over the disk is OK, but Windows does not know how to get at it. When Windows says a HDD is RAW, what that very often means is that there is an error in a little bit of the data in its administrative files (like the Partition Table or the Root Directory) so that Windows cannot understand it. I agree, do NOT Format the drive!! With current versions of Windows, a Full Format actually overwrites EVERYTHING with zeros, destroying all old data!