Help, Windows Formatted my Drive to RAW

pepsi71ocean · Jul 8, 2008

Hey guys, i came back from my island vacation to get back to my dad's computer issues. I fixed his computer and now i went to take the files off of my 3rd Phsyical drive and put them back onto his. Well i clicked on the H: drive and guess what, it told me that it was not formatted. I then went into disk Manager and looked around. I foudn that H: still exists but its changed from NTFS to RAW. Which RAW is an image file. The is is the second time that windows has done this in my whole life. The last time it did this the hardd rive was getting ready to die on me.

Back tot he issue at hand. That data is needed by my dad's company and he needs it asap. Unfortonately im in a bind as i don't know where to start. Gat Data Back for NTFS didn't find the directory i was hoping it would find, it got all other directories tho.

I need help guy.

Mussels · Jul 8, 2008

you'll need a tool to unformat the drive.

RAW means that the OS cant recognise it, as the partition data is damaged.

The most common cause i see for this is cancelling/losing power half way through a format, or someone hooking up two HDD's using the same master/slave setting. (two drives set to master, only one will show in windows, but the other will slowly corrupt)

You could try a recovery tool such as partition magic (its what i used last time this happened to me, however it didnt actually recover any data (back in early XP days) ) Otherwise you can pay a fortune and have data experts recover it. That is the safest option, seeings how its business data.

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Help, Windows Formatted my Drive to RAW

pepsi71ocean

New Member

Mussels

Freshwater Moderator