Damaged Partition
Hi, I have a western digital caviar hdd and recently I plugged it into a ide adapter and was able to access it on my laptop. Two days later when I tried to access it again I was unable to because the file type was RAW. I don't know if it's physically damaged or if the partition is corrupt but I tried several data/partition recovery software but none worked. Is there any solutions you can recommend to help me recover my data. Thanks.

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Kevin, IDE adapters can sometimes go bad - I would recommend installing the problem drive directly inside your computer if you have either a spare IDE slot / cable position, even if this means disconnecting an existing drive.
With the problem drive inside the machine, boot from a standalone boot CD such as Hiren's Boot CD which provides a means of 'looking' at the drive outside of your installed Windows by booting into a Mini-XP environment. If you can then see the drive contents using the standard Windows Explorer type tool, great, but if not, you have further choices available in the Hiren's Menu for recovery tools / partition tools that you can try.
If none of the Hiren's tools help with the drive, then reboot with the CD still in the system and go into the DOS Tools that are provided with the boot CD - one of these that I have used many times is HDAT2 which can check the IDE drive for bad sectors etc. See the attached PDF document for details on how to use HDAT2 from the Hiren's CD.
Anhang | Größe |
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345412-127321.pdf | 681.62 KB |
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Don't want to sound discouraging but if Windows sees the drive as RAW that idicates that no formating or partitioning information can be foind on the disk.
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Kevin, If the drive is suddenly showing raw, you may still have a chance. I've had this happen on a few systems where McAfee encryption suddenly "blew up", but I could still decrypt and then ended up with a raw partion. I've also seen this with some RAID controllers when they fail. I've had some luck with recovery software being able to recover the data in these cases, but it actually hasn't been overwritten but the partition table has somehow been corrupted. ou may want to consider a third party utility - EaseUS in this case:
http://www.easeus.com/resource/convert-raw-ntfs.htm
It's been awhile since I've had to use it. I believe the free vesion let's you see the data that can be recovered, but you'd have to purchase the licensed version to actually recover the data. If the free version looks like it can recover most of the data, it may be worth spending the money to complete the task.
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