Fixing hard drive error

dlinhc

Distinguished
May 26, 2011
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I have my 3.5" external hard drive connected to my laptop and the power supply to the external drive lost power all of a sudden and when i re-connected it to my laptop now it doesnt show up on Windows Explorer. when i check the drive's status under "Disk Managemnet" it now says the file system is "RAW" instead of NTFS. it then asks me if i want to format the drive? i have about 700GB worth of data on it that i cannot afford to lose.

also checked the Windows Log on Event Viewer and one of the many details say:

"The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1\DR1."
"The device, \Device\Harddisk1\DR1, has a bad block."
"The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume E:."
this keeps repeating along with other error messages..

i have been searching for a solution on google and right now i am guessing that the MBR or partition table is damaged? how would i fix this or does anyone know if the problem is something else? i really dont want to mess around with my options to save the drive just in case i render the data is un-recoverable.

How can i restore this drive back to the point when it was still working with all my data on it still intact?
 

almartin

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Apr 8, 2011
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I use Mini-tool Partition Wizard which is a free program. You can try this to set your partition back to NTFS. It does not seem like CHKDSK would mess up your file system.
Go to Partitionwizard.com if you are interested in this program.
 

John_VanKirk

Distinguished
hi there,

What OS are you using on your laptop computer?

What happens if the cache is enalbed on your external HDD and it abruptly looses power, the last part of data doesn't get written to the disk and the file or files become corrupted.

When you see an NTFS file system drive that is reported as RAW, the file system is probably corrupted and the OS thinks it's unformatted.

Past reports with this RAW problem say that if you connect the external drive to a Windows XP computer, it may be able to read the disk and you can copy off your data to a separate location. You can then reformat the external HDD with the NTFS file system and copy your data back to it.

It's worth a try and is non destructive.

If you reformat the drive, or recreate the partitions, you will lose your data on the drive
 

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