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Help, Windows Formatted my Drive to RAW

pepsi71ocean

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Joined
Nov 7, 2007
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Location
The Peoples Republic of New South Jersey
System Name The Grand Phoenix Clusterflop
Processor AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Deneb @3.4GHz
Motherboard ASRock 870 EXTREME3
Cooling Xigmatec S1284 (Lapped)1x200mm, 4x120mm
Memory Muskin Silverline 4GB DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) 9-9-9-24
Video Card(s) eVGA GTX 470 SC Edition 1280mb RAM (C/S/M)(640/1280/1705)
Storage 2x500GB Seagate, 32MB Cache 1xWD 40GB UMD IDE Hdd.
Display(s) SAMSUNG 22" LCDTV HD Monitor and Samsung 24"
Case COOLER MASTER RC-690
Audio Device(s) USB 2.0 Sound (USB out to my Stero System)
Power Supply Thermaltake XT TPX-775M 775W
Software Windows XP Home SP3
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.
 
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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