Recover NTFS Partition on RAW Drive

[CoreyRS]

Hello,

Recently my seagate freeagent GO 500gb drive malfunctioned somehow and now I can't access it. Having tried many things over the past few days and trying it on different machines, both internally and via USB, I just discovered that the partition has been deleted and the drive is now RAW. For some reason windows 7 machines very very rarely detect the drive, but windows xp seems to do so and keep it detected.

The files are still on the drive. I've scanned it with Recuva and all the files are still there. Since the partition has been deleted, if I use software such as Easeus Partition Recovery to recover the entire partition, will all the data be restored to? And also will recovering the partition cause any data loss, since it is being written to the drive?

 

[Hawkeye22]

Anytime partition changes are made, you risk losing data which is why you should always backup first when possible.

Try running easeus partition recovery and see what it finds. If the partition information looks correct then let it make the changes. If the software lets you make a backup of the current partition table, do this first.

 

[quesionboy]

Hello,

Recently my seagate freeagent GO 500gb drive malfunctioned somehow and now I can't access it. Having tried many things over the past few days and trying it on different machines, both internally and via USB, I just discovered that the partition has been deleted and the drive is now RAW. For some reason windows 7 machines very very rarely detect the drive, but windows xp seems to do so and keep it detected.

The files are still on the drive. I've scanned it with Recuva and all the files are still there. Since the partition has been deleted, if I use software such as Easeus Partition Recovery to recover the entire partition, will all the data be restored to? And also will recovering the partition cause any data loss, since it is being written to the drive?

I think the issue is on the partition table, you'd better fix the partition table first, before use third party recovery software you should notice that, the more times of rewriting to your hard disk the harder it will be recovered.

 

[abdulla846]

I think the issue is on the partition table, you'd better fix the partition table first, before use third party recovery software you should notice that, the more times of rewriting to your hard disk the harder it will be recovered.

I have a similar problem
Can you please explain how to fix the partition table?

 

[FireWire2]

...For some reason windows 7 machines very very rarely detect the drive, but windows xp seems to do so and keep it detected.

Often enough this is an easy fix.
Note: No matter what DO NOT format the drive.

Go to Disk Manager, Right click at the long bar, where is stated RAW
Select Option "Change Drive Letter an Path"; Select "Add" function to assign a driver letter
Once you assign a drive letter, you should be able to acces the drive

 

[mykl_74]

...For some reason windows 7 machines very very rarely detect the drive, but windows xp seems to do so and keep it detected.

Often enough this is an easy fix.
Note: No matter what DO NOT format the drive.

Go to Disk Manager, Right click at the long bar, where is stated RAW
Select Option "Change Drive Letter an Path"; Select "Add" function to assign a driver letter
Once you assign a drive letter, you should be able to acces the drive

FireWire2 is correct. I have an external storage device with 7TB of data on it, showing up as RAW. I just assigned it a drive letter, and all the data is again accessible. Thanks FireWire2!

 

[FireWire2]

I'm glad that help... BTW this does apply to USB drive too

 

[kspanks04]

I'm having a similar problem and EASUS PR finds my deleted partition but the proceed button is greyed out and I cannot continue.

I also tried using ACRONIS, but the program wouldn't even open unless I unplugged my hard drive.

Any ideas?

Edit: JK I didn't realize that was a progress bar at the bottom because it was moving so slow.

 

[cb3000]

...For some reason windows 7 machines very very rarely detect the drive, but windows xp seems to do so and keep it detected.

Often enough this is an easy fix.
Note: No matter what DO NOT format the drive.

Go to Disk Manager, Right click at the long bar, where is stated RAW
Select Option "Change Drive Letter an Path"; Select "Add" function to assign a driver letter
Once you assign a drive letter, you should be able to acces the drive

FireWire2 is correct. I have an external storage device with 7TB of data on it, showing up as RAW. I just assigned it a drive letter, and all the data is again accessible. Thanks FireWire2!

Sorry guys, but when trying to assign a new letter, the option is not available. Its there but not clickable. what to do next then? I have a 500GB USB HDD and in risk of losing a lot valuable data in there. thxs

 

[FireWire2]

...For some reason windows 7 machines very very rarely detect the drive, but windows xp seems to do so and keep it detected.

Often enough this is an easy fix.
Note: No matter what DO NOT format the drive.

Go to Disk Manager, Right click at the long bar, where is stated RAW
Select Option "Change Drive Letter an Path"; Select "Add" function to assign a driver letter
Once you assign a drive letter, you should be able to acces the drive

FireWire2 is correct. I have an external storage device with 7TB of data on it, showing up as RAW. I just assigned it a drive letter, and all the data is again accessible. Thanks FireWire2!

Sorry guys, but when trying to assign a new letter, the option is not available. Its there but not clickable. what to do next then? I have a 500GB USB HDD and in risk of losing a lot valuable data in there. thxs

It shows up in DM, then you should able to assign the drive letter
There much more than what you said...
Does the drive show as offline?
Does the drive show as RAW?
Does the drive show as Unavailable?

A capture image would be good

 

[atifkerry]

...For some reason windows 7 machines very very rarely detect the drive, but windows xp seems to do so and keep it detected.

Often enough this is an easy fix.
Note: No matter what DO NOT format the drive.

Go to Disk Manager, Right click at the long bar, where is stated RAW
Select Option "Change Drive Letter an Path"; Select "Add" function to assign a driver letter
Once you assign a drive letter, you should be able to acces the drive

FireWire2 is correct. I have an external storage device with 7TB of data on it, showing up as RAW. I just assigned it a drive letter, and all the data is again accessible. Thanks FireWire2!

Sorry guys, but when trying to assign a new letter, the option is not available. Its there but not clickable. what to do next then? I have a 500GB USB HDD and in risk of losing a lot valuable data in there. thxs

It shows up in DM, then you should able to assign the drive letter
There much more than what you said...
Does the drive show as offline?
Does the drive show as RAW?
Does the drive show as Unavailable?

A capture image would be good

I have the same problem, my partitions shows unallocated, please advise how to fix this and restore partition table.

 

[FireWire2]

If you have an unallocated HDD, time to look for a recovery tools like R-Stutio or other data recovery utiltity. The above procedure only for partition shows as "RAW"

 

[Eric-Ludwig]

...For some reason windows 7 machines very very rarely detect the drive, but windows xp seems to do so and keep it detected.

Often enough this is an easy fix.
Note: No matter what DO NOT format the drive.

Go to Disk Manager, Right click at the long bar, where is stated RAW
Select Option "Change Drive Letter an Path"; Select "Add" function to assign a driver letter
Once you assign a drive letter, you should be able to acces the drive

 

[Eric-Ludwig]

My drive is showing up as RAW but already has a drive letter. When I select "add" it only lets me embed it into another drive which doesn't work. When I assign it a new drive letter it still shows up as raw. The computer insists that it needs to be formatted before it can be used and this comes up when I try to give it a new drive letter. My choices are to either format or hit cancel. It does go ahead and change the drive letter but nothing else happens.

 

[FireWire2]

My drive is showing up as RAW but already has a drive letter. When I select "add" it only lets me embed it into another drive which doesn't work. When I assign it a new drive letter it still shows up as raw. The computer insists that it needs to be formatted before it can be used and this comes up when I try to give it a new drive letter. My choices are to either format or hit cancel. It does go ahead and change the drive letter but nothing else happens.

Can you give more detail about the issue that you have?
- Move from what OS to what OS?
- What is interface that you use on other system and the system has issue?
... the more detail are better

 

[Derek Herbage]

My drive is showing up as RAW but already has a drive letter. When I select "add" it only lets me embed it into another drive which doesn't work. When I assign it a new drive letter it still shows up as raw. The computer insists that it needs to be formatted before it can be used and this comes up when I try to give it a new drive letter. My choices are to either format or hit cancel. It does go ahead and change the drive letter but nothing else happens.

Can you give mreo detail about the issue that you have?
- Move from what OS to what OS?
- What is interface that you use on other system and the system has issue?
... the more detail are better

I am having a similar problem, my laptop crashed with a 500GB HDD, I connected it to another machine and it shows up as raw, has drive letters assigned to it but I cant access the drive as when I click on either og the 2 partitions it tells me to format to continue.

 

[Louise Porkolt]

Sometimes when a drive is RAW, the first step is to goto "configuration screen" --> "Computer management" --> "device management" and remove (uninstall) the drivers of the faulting HDD-device. Let the drive be found again by the system and the drive should be visible again !
This worked once or twice for me ! If not move on to other possibilities.

The Linux- (or -apple) Idea is my second guess. (Have a PC with Mac or Ubuntu to have more options to recover RAW drives !)

People who think that Windows is the best "and" people who think that Mac or Linux is the best... both are wrong !
Study and try both !!!
It's like a religion: they're all the same --> good and bad !!

 

[sambadi]

...For some reason windows 7 machines very very rarely detect the drive, but windows xp seems to do so and keep it detected.

Often enough this is an easy fix.
Note: No matter what DO NOT format the drive.

Go to Disk Manager, Right click at the long bar, where is stated RAW
Select Option "Change Drive Letter an Path"; Select "Add" function to assign a driver letter
Once you assign a drive letter, you should be able to acces the drive

FireWire2 is correct. I have an external storage device with 7TB of data on it, showing up as RAW. I just assigned it a drive letter, and all the data is again accessible. Thanks FireWire2!

Sorry guys, but when trying to assign a new letter, the option is not available. Its there but not clickable. what to do next then? I have a 500GB USB HDD and in risk of losing a lot valuable data in there. thxs

It shows up in DM, then you should able to assign the drive letter
There much more than what you said...
Does the drive show as offline?
Does the drive show as RAW?
Does the drive show as Unavailable?

A capture image would be good

My drive is showing up as RAW but already has a drive letter. When I select "add" it only lets me embed it into another drive which doesn't work. When I assign it a new drive letter it still shows up as raw. The computer insists that it needs to be formatted before it can be used and this comes up when I try to give it a new drive letter. My choices are to either format or hit cancel. It does go ahead and change the drive letter but nothing else happens.

Can you give more detail about the issue that you have?
- Move from what OS to what OS?
- What is interface that you use on other system and the system has issue?
... the more detail are better

Hi FireWire 2! I have the same problem: An A-DATA 2TB extern HDD (only USB with no power supply) with so many important data on it. It worked ok under WIN7 x64 but I made a stupid thing: I tried to mount on Android. After that, it kept same drive letter (H but it is seen as RAW. I tried all described above: changing letter drive (that was visible all the time), re-installing the A-DATA driver ... nothing!

Before finding this thread I used several methods:
- testdisk-7.0-WIP: ... couldn't re-write the table because didn't show the whole folder structure at DIR
- RecoverMyFiles v5, which worked for some files but most didn't work (they are saved BUT don't open)
... below is the report of HDDScan for Win v3:

Num Attribute Name Value Worst Raw(hex) Threshold
001 Raw Read Error Rate 100 100 0000000000-0000 050
002 Throughput performance 100 100 0000000000-0000 050
003 Spin Up Time 100 100 0000000000-0712 001
004 Start/Stop Count 100 100 0000000000-0BF7 000
005 Reallocation Sector Count 100 100 0000000000-0000 010
007 Seek Error Rate 100 100 0000000000-0000 050
008 Seek time Perfomance 100 100 0000000000-0000 050
009 Power-On Hours Count 096 096 0000000000-07A4 000
010 Spin Retry Count 160 100 0000000000-0000 030
012 Device Power Cycle Count 100 100 0000000000-0427 000
191 G-sense Rate/Servo tracking 100 100 0000000000-0008 000
192 Emergency Retract Count 100 100 0000000000-011F 000
193 Load/unload Cycle Count 099 099 0000000000-32C7 000
194 HDA Temperature 100 100 36 C 000
194 HDA Temperature Maximum 100 100 55 C 000
194 HDA Temperature Minimum 100 100 12 C 000
196 Reallocation Event Count 100 100 0000000000-0000 000
197 Current Pending Errors Count 100 100 0000000000-0000 000
198 Uncorrectable Errors Count 100 100 0000000000-0000 000
199 UltraDMA CRC Errors 200 200 0000000000-0000 000
220 Disk Shift 100 100 0000000000-0000 000
222 Loaded Hours 098 098 0000000000-0424 000
223 Load Retry Count 100 100 0000000000-0000 000
224 Load Friction 100 100 0000000000-0000 000
226 Load-in Time 100 100 0000000000-010B 000
240 Heads Flying Hours 100 100 0000000000-0000 001

Any idea?

 

[fzabkar]

@sambadi, I would examine your drive with a disc editor, eg DMDE (freeware):

http://dmde.com/

Could you show us DMDE's Partitions window?

If you are lucky, the solution may only require a few mouse-clicks.

 

[sambadi]

@sambadi, I would examine your drive with a disc editor, eg DMDE (freeware):

http://dmde.com/

Could you show us DMDE's Partitions window?

If you are lucky, the solution may only require a few mouse-clicks.

Thank you,fzabkar! Please see bellow:
Physical Drive 1 [1.00 TB] MBR 1.00 TB [ T ] LBA: 0 - 1 953 525 166
$Noname 02 found NTFS 1.00 TB [ x C x f] LBA: 63 - 1 953 525 166
ADATA-CH94 Primary NTFS (07) 1.00 TB [ E B C F ] LBA: 2 048 - 1 953 521 663

Could you tell me what next?

 

[fzabkar]

If you double-click the ADATA-CH94 partition, can you see your files? If so, try to recover a few files to another drive and test their integrity (r-click the file/folder and select recover Files).

BTW, HDDScan's SMART report is clear of errors.

Have you tried running CHKDSK against the drive in readonly mode?

 

[fzabkar]

@sambadi, I should add that DMDE has detected a 1TB drive. You stated that its capacity was 2TB. Are we looking at the correct drive?

 

[sambadi]

If you double-click the ADATA-CH94 partition, can you see your files? If so, try to recover a few files to another drive and test their integrity (r-click the file/folder and select recover Files).

BTW, HDDScan's SMART report is clear of errors.

Have you tried running CHKDSK against the drive in readonly mode?

@sambadi, I should add that DMDE has detected a 1TB drive. You stated that its capacity was 2TB. Are we looking at the correct drive?

Hi, fzabkar! Thank you for noticing! Yes, you are very right! the hard is 1 TB. Sorry about that! I'm tired trying and somehow I mistyped. I post again the partitions:
Physical Drive 1 [1.00 TB] MBR 1.00 TB [ T ] LBA: 0 - 1 953 525 166
$Noname 02 found NTFS 1.00 TB [ x x ] LBA: 63 - 1 953 525 166
$Noname 02 found NTFS 1.00 TB [ x C x f] LBA: 63 - 1 953 525 166
Primary NTFS (07) 1.00 TB [ E ] LBA: 2 048 - 1 953 521 663
ADATA-CH94 NTFS (07) 1.00 TB [ B F ] LBA: 2 048 - 1 953 521 663
ADATA-CH94 NTFS (07) 1.00 TB [ C F ] LBA: 2 048 - 1 953 521 663

I run before the chkdsk /f with no success. Every tool I used before shown the folder structure as before RAW but none saved correctly the files. I followed what you recommended and the 2 files were saved ok! Is there a possibility to modify the partition table ... or something, without having to recover on another location? Being a back-up disk, it is biggest I have at the moment.

 

[fzabkar]

ISTM that DMDE has found a 1TB partition table entry (E), a valid NTFS boot sector (B), a copy of this boot sector (C), and a file system (F). If any of E, B, or C had been damaged, then the repair would have been simple. AFAICT, the damage must exist within the actual file system, in which case it's not something that I could help you with. :-( However, to be absolutely certain that E,B, and C are OK, I would examine sectors 0, 2048, and 1953521663. Sectors 2048 and 1953521663 should have an "NTFS" signature and should be identical.

 

[sambadi]

ISTM that DMDE has found a 1TB partition table entry (E), a valid NTFS boot sector (B), a copy of this boot sector (C), and a file system (F). If any of E, B, or C had been damaged, then the repair would have been simple. AFAICT, the damage must exist within the actual file system, in which case it's not something that I could help you with. :-( However, to be absolutely certain that E,B, and C are OK, I would examine sectors 0, 2048, and 1953521663. Sectors 2048 and 1953521663 should have an "NTFS" signature and should be identical.

Hi, fzabkar! ... and thank you for all your support! Last night I have managed to recover the partition, in a few clicks as you said, but with a different tool. As said before, every tool used shown the partition with every file correct (at least as structure) but raw format. I tried to recover some files with them but several saved/recovered test files "in a bad shape". Looking around I tried the free version of EaseUS Partition Master 10.2 ... and that worked. "Check partition" solved my problem. In any case, I studied for a few moments the partition tables but to solve manually by myself, for sure I wouldn't try!