Should my boot drive show mostly as a RAW file format?

Charvelguy

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May 20, 2015
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I recently had problems with my desktop which suddenly stopped booting to bios. I only get a startup beep and then two short beeps not long after and cannot get past a black screen. According to what I can find, this may indicate a hardware problem. I pulled the boot drive and put it in an external reader on a working system so I can view it in a Windows environment and I can see two parts to the drive while in My Computer - Hard drives. All I can see is a small file system labeled system reserved and the rest of the drive space as local disc with a RAW file system format.

When I go into disk management, I can see a partition of 15gb which is healthy, and the rest of the drive as another partition.

IS this normal for a boot drive to read like this? I am unable to view anything on any part of it. It does spin up and gets warm so I assume the drive itself is mechanically ok and workable.
 
Hey there, Charvelguy.

It really seems like the drive might not be in good condition. Either the drive is failing or something else caused the partition corruption. When a partition is shown as RAW, that basically means that it has no File System and even if your data is still there, it can't be recognized by your OS.
Do you have any data, which you need to recover? If not, I'd recommend that you download the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic tool and run the tests so that you find out if any errors or bad sectors pop-up.
On the other hand, if you do need to recover data, I'd suggest that you try accessing the drive via Linux Live CD/USB, to see if it's able to recognized the HDD properly and if you can get to your data, or try some of the data recovery options from this thread: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html

Hope that helps. Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD
 

Charvelguy

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May 20, 2015
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I was trying to get a wireless keyboard to install and read. All I did was put a dongle in and rebooted, and I got no boot to bios. Keyboard didn't work either. I doubt that could have corrupted the drive or the bios but I thought I'd put it out there.

I can run a diagnostic disk on my laptop and see if it comes up with anything but I'll try Linux live, see where that gets me. The drive is a Seagate 750gb. I'd have to take it out again to get the model. Thanks!
 
As you've correctly stated, that's not something that would've have causes such issues with the drive. It might be a lot of things - even a virus or malware might corrupt the partition's file system. Good luck on getting your data back, fingers crossed!
After you're done with that, if the diagnostic tool finds any errors or bad sectors, then I'd recommend that you contact the SSD manufacturer's customer support and ask about RMA if the drive is still under warranty.