Failed external hard drive question -- if you can give help, I will seriously write you poems of praise .. :)?

Question

Hi everyone --- I have a hard drive which has gone the way of the crapper. I had about 300 gigs of data on it (MOST of which is backed up, but not all), and at this point, when I plug the drive in, windows recognizes it, but says that the drive is not formated. when I click in properties, it says that the drive is in RAW format (as opposed to FAT32). I KNOW there is data on this drive. Any ideas?????

Answer 1

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but what has happened is that somehow your drive has lost it's "File Allocation Table."

This table is sort of the table of contents for your processor. It indicates where all the data is on the disk, and where to to go retrieve the data. Without this table, your computer assumes that there is no data, and with out the partitioning, which is also indicated by the existance of the table, your computer assumes it's in the RAW format.

For the most part, think of this drive as in the same condition as a brand new drive that has never been formatted.

However, what you need to know is whether or not the drive is still useable. Hopefully this is not an ancient drive and still supported. What you should do is go to the manufacturers web site, or call them, perhaps, and see if there is a free ware down load to test the drive.

In the old days, this was something you downloaded into your computer, then from there pasted or unzipped the program onto a series of floppies, then booted up the computer from the floppies. From there you could run a series of tests. Typically, these tests deleted the data from the disk, but at least you knew whether or not it was worth formatting again.

Before you do anything, I would contact the disk manufactuerer, and see what they have to say. It is good that most of the data was backed up, as this kind of data retrieval is most difficult.

Good luck!

Answer 2

Copy n paste >>>
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Unix uses RAW as filesystem, like Windows uses FAT/FAT32/NTFS. Its basically a way of organizing i/o of data on the harddisk.

Now as the partition shows up as RAW there might as well be something wrong with the Partition Table of your harddisk. What i suggest would be using some conversion software like Partition Magic from Powerquest (30day trial on their webpage) and see if u can convert the partition from RAW to FAT32 to make it accessible.

Download linkt o Partition Magic: http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/rydium.bc/;sz=468x60;ord=3140811941120773.5?
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Partition Magic is real cheap on ebay and it's fairly easy to get to grips with. From what I just copied n pasted, it looks like it might convert it back for you.

Best of luck.

Answer 3

download and install restoration and pc inspector (free file recovery softwares) use both of them. Install them on your regular hard disk and run recovery on the exernal hard disk. Read details on how to use them on the link below
http://mypchelp.blogspot.com/2006/09/file-recovery-and-file-destruction.html

Answer 4

http://forum.worldstart.com/showthread.php?p=1023644#post1023644

Also you can use www.ccrap.com


This is going to have some answers for you.