ESATA / USB Drive Asking to be Formatted (RAW)

[kspanks04]

I have a Fantom GFII1000EU 1 TB external hard drive. I usually connect it to my Win 7 computer using ESATA (JMICRON driver).

I recently moved and when I set up my computer again I was asked to format the disk. In disk manager it shows up as RAW. Changing the drive letter does not fix the problem. It doesn't matter if I use USB or ESATA, same result.

I'm afraid to run dskchk because I started a scan and it looked like it was just deleting every item so I canceled it. I haven't tried the drive on any other OS.

Any ideas or recommended software to recover my data? Thanks!

 

[spooky2th]

You might try Recuva. Here is the free version.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download

 

[FireWire2]

Take a look at this treat
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/283116-32-recover-ntfs-partition-drive#10959871

 

[kspanks04]

Take a look at this treat
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/283116-32-recover-ntfs-partition-drive#10959871

Thanks, I did see that thread, but I was hoping there was a solution that wouldn't require recovering the data first and fixing the partition later. Its a big drive with thousands upon thousands of folders. I want to try the EASEUS partition recovery tool, but I'm afraid of losing data!

 

[FireWire2]

Take a look at this treat
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/283116-32-recover-ntfs-partition-drive#10959871

Thanks, I did see that thread, but I was hoping there was a solution that wouldn't require recovering the data first and fixing the partition later. Its a big drive with thousands upon thousands of folders. I want to try the EASEUS partition recovery tool, but I'm afraid of losing data!

There is NO recovery in the above thread.
Actually this wont alter ANY data of your HDD. It just try to assigned a drive letter, so system can see it...

W/O drive letter such as: D:; E: , G:.... you can not access HDD in Windows

 

[kspanks04]

Ok, the problem is not with a drive letter. The correct letter shows up. However, my drive's label does not show up in My Computer. MS disk manager shows the drive as being RAW.

If I load a program like EASUS, Acronis, or Recuva, they eventually see the drive (programs freeze up for a good while), and they see the correct label ("Media"). AND they recognize the partition as NTFS, but they are unable to find a restorable partition and I cannot browse any files. All programs correctly identify used vs unused amounts of data but Recuva is only able to find less than 1% of the data after it does a complete scan.

I'm at a loss as what to do here