How to recover and use a drive with a RAW format.

[medmol]

My wife's seagate external 2 tb drive is having a problem. The drive is not recognized on her laptop. I have gone through the trobleshooting and connected the drive to another laptop and through computer management found that the data was raw and the drive is healthy. How do I recover the data and make the drive usable? Any help would be great!
Thanks

 

[dechy]

RAW format usually means the OS can't read / doesn't see any information in the MBR/partition table to recognize any data, so it might be corrupted/erased.

There are ways to possibly re-write the MBR using the fixmbr command in XP or bootrec /fixmbr in Vista/7 both from the Recovery Console. I've never used the Vista/W7 one as we ain't there at work yet, but I have used the XP one and it was successful a few times (not nearly as often as I would hope...) I've also never tried this on an external drive (not allowed @ work for security reasons), but if possible, make DAMN sure to target the correct drive, as it will select your boot drive as stated in the articles.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392 for Vista / W7
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx?mfr=true for XP

 

[Paperdoc]

I understand either of these two software products can recover the data from a HDD whose File System is corrupted to appear as "RAW". In BOTH cases, I believe, the software will NOT write to the troubled disk, it will only READ from it. That means that all the data it can recover MUST be written to a different disk, so you will need a spare HDD big enough to hold all the recovered data.

Check out GetDataBack NTFS here, and note how their free trial lets you examine all it can recover before you pay your fee and buy the package to complete the recovery process:

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

Easeus Data Recovery Wizard from here has been used by many:

http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/

Note that, at lower right of that web page, you can click on the link "How to recover files from RAW drive?", and it takes you here to show you detailed process:

http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/recover-raw-drive.htm

 

[medmol]

I tried easeus data recovery and it didn't find any files. Having gone the companies web site to find a tutorial. I followed their directions and it found no files, no directories just nothing recoverable. I'm trying "test disk" to rebuild the boot sector and bring back the file system.

 

[joshwhillis]

QUOTED SPAM REDACTED - SS

Thank you so much for your brilliant answer. I just have the same problem on my flac files. I lost over 600GB of ripped music (FLAC files) on an external hard drive when Windows decided to run an overnight update while my computer was running a batch-file conversion on a bunch of old aiff files. The computer could no longer recognize the hard drive or find any files.
The free software showed me that the program could actually find and save those files.
Thanks again and a million times.

 

[musicmanil]

My wife's seagate external 2 tb drive is having a problem. The drive is not recognized on her laptop. I have gone through the trobleshooting and connected the drive to another laptop and through computer management found that the data was raw and the drive is healthy. How do I recover the data and make the drive usable? Any help would be great!
Thanks

I had the exact same problem as you and I really needed to get all of my data back. I looked on some other forums and found that the Photorec software worked the best for me and a lot of other people. My drive was 500gb and I left it searching from 6pm till the next morning around 7:30am. Given that your drive is double the size, I would find a time that you are not at the house or something and let it do its thing. Hope this helps!

Here is where you can download the program:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

 

[newtonmsoi]

thanks, this helped me.

 

[marinogf]

I just used TestDisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download), followed the Step-By-Step instructions (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step), and recovered my 250 gb external drive in about 10 hours.
Make sure that you copy all of your data out of the drive to a local drive before reformatting.
Please be aware that TestDisk is FREE, but Christophe Grenier spends his time developing. If your recovered data is worth anything, please consider donating.

 

[Bob Arctor]

RAW format usually means the OS can't read / doesn't see any information in the MBR/partition table to recognize any data, so it might be corrupted/erased.

There are ways to possibly re-write the MBR using the fixmbr command in XP or bootrec /fixmbr in Vista/7 both from the Recovery Console. I've never used the Vista/W7 one as we ain't there at work yet, but I have used the XP one and it was successful a few times (not nearly as often as I would hope...) I've also never tried this on an external drive (not allowed @ work for security reasons), but if possible, make DAMN sure to target the correct drive, as it will select your boot drive as stated in the articles.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392 for Vista / W7
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx?mfr=true for XP

I tried this. They tell you to run bootrec.exe at the command line prompt. bootrec.exe seems to want to run by default on the boot drive as it does not allow you to specify what drive to check. If a drive is raw is doesn't boot therefore this is USELESS except for drives that work but have some other problem.

 

[Bob Arctor]

EaseUS seems to be working on this RAW drive but it takes quite a long while. Many hours. It's showing the entire directory structure and individual files that it's finding. So, hopefully the actual content of those files will also be available when the utility completes its scan.

 

[LollysonP]

When the drive file subsystem is changed into RAW, the inner stored data will often be inaccessible before the formatting process. Therefore, without a drive data backup, the data inside could be really unsafe.
But, that’s not to say, there is not way to rescue the drive data before format. As long as it is not overwritten by anything else, you need some drive data recovery software.
Here, I have searched one thread in this forum for you to know more detailed information of RAW drive recovery:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/263779-32-change-file-type-ntfs

 

[abcde06991]

The best solution no doubt for a non-readable usb stick drive is to (if you have one) get your Xbox 360 and follow these steps. BUT BEFORE YOU DO THIS YOU MIGHT WANT TO REMOVE ALL YOUR FILES OFF OF IT BEFORE YOU FORMAT IT, BY USING A RECOVERY TOOL. I don't want to get blamed for my fault if you do forget to remove the files.
1 - Turn on your Xbox, sign in and insert your usb stick.
2 - Once you're on the home screen go all the way to the right to settings, and go to console.
3 - Once you're on the system setting go to storage and navigate your way to your usb stick.
4 - It will not say any information on it, so press A on your usb stick.
5 - Press configure now, and wait for that to finish. Once it's finished it will have storage for your Xbox 360 console.
6 - I'm not gonna go into detail on what it's for because it has nothing to do with this post. Remove your usb stick and insert it into your computer.
7 - Once finished go to computer on your start menu (windows logo in bottom left corner). Right-click on your usb stick and click format.
8 - Do quick format, I recommend it. When it's finished your usb stick is ready to go so remove it and VOILA.
You're welcome -random guy

 

[BaBlu44]

Hi. If your external or internal hdd is corrupted and RAW formatted and whenever you are tryiing to open your HDD some error message like " Drive can't be accessed.. blah blah.." is showing on your screen then you should follow the following few steps.
1. First take a deep breathe.
2. Open the command prompt Admin.
3. Run this commad - " chkdsk <<drive letter of your corrupted disk>> : /f "
(** don't write '<<' or '>>' and drive letter means the particular letter inside the parentheses beside the name of that corrupted drive. )
(* if this fails to work then write ' r ' instead of ' f ' )

 

[jackx429]

I was living on a military base, and I had my family send my hard drive from my tower back home so that I could use it with a reader on the laptop i had on base.

When the time to come home came, I packed everything and when I finally got back and put the drive into my tower, I got the windows10 bluescreen of death. The two meesages I kept getting were:

WDF_Violation and NTFS_File_System

I went and hooked it up to my laptop and the file explorer said that Windows couldn't access the drive because it was corrupted or unreadable.

I went through many things in attempt to fix this, and I didn't want to have to try and recover anything because I knew this had to be fixable.

I looked at the partitions on the drive, and all of my data showed up in RAW format.

The Fix:
ElevatedCMD: chkdsk /offlinescanandfix [drive letter followed by :]

at first I freaked out because it was deleting a whole lot of stuff. But later it repairs the same files and replaces them. Now my drive works like it did back on base.

 

[docfallingapart]

Everything on this page is good information. However, you may save a lot of time if you try things in this order.

1. Run [CHKDSK :<<Drive Letter>> /F]. This is a fast fix if it works.
2. TestDisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download), followed the Step-By-Step instructions (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step). Takes a long time but may fix your drive.
3. One of the data recovery software solutions like, Easeus Data Recovery Wizard. Takes a long time and you need another drive to recover your data to.

 

[Angel_30]

I understand either of these two software products can recover the data from a HDD whose File System is corrupted to appear as "RAW". In BOTH cases, I believe, the software will NOT write to the troubled disk, it will only READ from it. That means that all the data it can recover MUST be written to a different disk, so you will need a spare HDD big enough to hold all the recovered data.

Check out GetDataBack NTFS here, and note how their free trial lets you examine all it can recover before you pay your fee and buy the package to complete the recovery process:

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

Easeus Data Recovery Wizard from here has been used by many:

http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/

Note that, at lower right of that web page, you can click on the link "How to recover files from RAW drive?", and it takes you here to show you detailed process:

http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/recover-raw-drive.htm