A drive that is showing RAW could be for a number of reasons... basically, Windows is unable to determine the file system on the drive. It could be a failed or failing drive, or something has corrupted the file system table (MFT). If it is corruption, recovery is possible.
First of all, Windows will want to format the drive, do not do this! Formatting the drive will destroy any MFT structure that remains... of which, could still be valid. Next, I would recommend shutting down the machine, and leaving it for 5 - 10 mins and restarting. I have seen drives come back from a RAW state when doing this.
Next, for data recovery, we use http://www.r-studio.com/, although it is not free it is very good. I have also used Recuva - https://www.piriform.com/recuva, but I'm not sure how well it works with RAW drives (may need to format the drive first which is not desirable). Another one that was sent to me some time ago was http://www.easeus.com/resource/repair-raw-disk.htm but I have not tried this. I've also been told https://www.minitool.com/partition-manager/partition-wizard-home.html is good at recovering RAW drives (I believe it has an explicit option to do so).
From memory, some recovery utilities will be able to recover data on a RAW drive, and some others will want to format first. Obviously formatting will modify the drive, so this is not the best option when recovering (that said formatting does not destroy data on a drive, just formats the file table)... so a utility that accesses a RAW drive is best, however you will need to the copy the data to another source (recovery to the same drive not possible when it is in a RAW state).
When recovering, you only need to recover the mount point folder, this looks similar to " {11112222-3333-4444-5555-666677778888}", but your number will be different. If you send the Drive Bender log files to support, we may be able to determine the correct mount point folder(s).
The upside is that, because this is quite a common issues, and a quick Google search will reveal many ways and tools to recover the drive.
One important point, this is not related to Drive Bender. Drive Bender does not have any low-level access to any of the hard drives in the system.
Comments
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.