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After reinstall, W7 says my 2nd hard drive is in RAW format..wtf?

M

Matt915

Banned
OK, so I have 2 hard drives, an SSD for my OS, and a 2nd drive that I store all my files on. I had to do a reinstall this morning, and since I understand W7 has issues installing sometimes when there's 2 discs connected, I disconnected the power and sata cable from my 2nd drive. So I install W7, and it goes fine. I turn off the computer, plug the 2nd drive back in, turn the computer on, and see the drive letter, but when I click on it, I get a message "You need to format the disc before you use it". So I'm thinking, wtf? I go into disc management and it's listed there as well, but the File System is listed as Raw. So I'm thinking, how the hell did that happen? Since W7 only takes 15 minutes to install on the SSD I use, I decided to install it once again, but leaving the 2nd drive connected this time, hoping that would somehow fix it. Nope.

So is there ANY way to fix this? My BIOS recognizes that the disc is there, as does windows...it's just telling me it's in RAW right now, and I have no clue how that happened. Oddly enough I even made an UBUNTU disc and booted to that...but from UBUNTU that 2nd drive doesn't even show up, it only recognizes the existence of my primary hard drive.
 
ive had it happen before and ive got bad news, your gonna have to use a recovery program to get your data off it and then reformat the drive

i recommend

get data back by runtime

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

well worth the money, as long as the drive is spinning you can get your data off it. you do however need another drive to move all the data to
 
This happened to a friend of mine once. Download the trial for EASEUS Data Recovery and it will be alright. Or I hope so. The last time I did this, I had flawless results.
 
Windows is real finicky about what filesystems it'll mount, you might be able to just boot a Linux live CD and read the filesystem from there.
 
Anubis said:
ive had it happen before and ive got bad news, your gonna have to use a recovery program to get your data off it and then reformat the drive

i recommend

get data back by runtime

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

well worth the money, as long as the drive is spinning you can get your data off it. you do however need another drive to move all the data to
Click to expand...

This is so weird....it finds an NTFS file system on the disc...but then when I get to the step to recover data, it's completely blank, like there's nothing to recover. wtf??
 
OK guys, update...I tried Partition Wizard...when I would select the disc in question in the recovery wizard, it wouldn't let me select 'next', so that was a dead end. Both with the program, and using the bootable cd. Next I tried something called Get Data Back, which found an NTFS partition on the drive, but when I got to the screen that should have listed all my files to recover...it was blank. I tried Paragon next and similarly it did nothing. So I gave Recuva Data a try...and here's where it gets interesting, when I select the drive in question, at the bottom of the screen it says "Unable to read boot sector". Could that be causing the issue??
 
Chiefcrowe said:
yes.. you may want to run a disk diagnostic on it.
Click to expand...

What should I run? I'm not familiar with this area really


I really need this stuff back. My house got broken into very recently and this computer was left, unfortunately all my backups were stolen. I'd lose all my correspondence from my parents growing up, old journals, photos, videos from my childhood.
 
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If it's that valuable, maybe you should think about a good data recovery company before you really F something up. Think about losing all your stuff from your parents...stuff you'll never be able to get back. What's that worth to you, for the rest of your life?

Are you willing to trust what you're doing here as not messing something up?

Chuck
 
yea in your case, reading that, i'd go to a data recovery company.

that reminds me i need to redo my backups! what a bummer man!
 
Dont do any recovery, then you will be in trouble
you basically redid the HDD with new MBR and orphaned the second drive
everything is still there
An SSD complicates things
First thing is to go in diskmangement and right click the dead drive (Disk 1?) and right click and see if you can click on "online" or if its greyed out
if you can - do it
Next go to CMD prompt in SSD and type

diskpart
lis dis
sel dis 1
lis par

after ea cmd hit enter
I ASSUME dead disk is Disk 1 and SSD is disk 0
then make a screenshot and post it here

In worst case you have to rebuild MBR
You need to put in any regular HDD and load Win 7 while the second drive is attatched
Then i will give you a link for PartitionTable doctor v 3.5 and we will take it from there
 
Nothinman said:
Windows is real finicky about what filesystems it'll mount, you might be able to just boot a Linux live CD and read the filesystem from there.
Click to expand...

This x2

I have had the same issue but linux would still see and mount the drive. I then copied off my files and re formatted the drive after.
 
another thing that can happen if you have the BIOS geometry for a particular HDD set as LARGE and you move it to another PC where the default is AUTO or LBA. This was a big deal coupla years ago when guys started switching drives around without making sure BIOS geometry setting coordinated with actual geometry used for disk
 
alright I'll try that when I get home bankster....good news though, I found a laptop I thought I hadn't used in ages...apparently I did a full backup on December 29th,2010 of EVERYTHING off the old drive, so now I'm just trying to get back my data from January....which is several important documents, so I'll post that screen shot when I get home!
 
bankster55 said:
Dont do any recovery, then you will be in trouble
you basically redid the HDD with new MBR and orphaned the second drive
everything is still there
An SSD complicates things
First thing is to go in diskmangement and right click the dead drive (Disk 1?) and right click and see if you can click on "online" or if its greyed out
if you can - do it
Next go to CMD prompt in SSD and type

diskpart
lis dis
sel dis 1
lis par

after ea cmd hit enter
I ASSUME dead disk is Disk 1 and SSD is disk 0
then make a screenshot and post it here

In worst case you have to rebuild MBR
You need to put in any regular HDD and load Win 7 while the second drive is attatched
Then i will give you a link for PartitionTable doctor v 3.5 and we will take it from there
Click to expand...


piczv.jpg


It's actually disc 0
 
Oh yeah.
You did something to change your HDD from basic to dynamic (variable in size according to needs)
You really would have ruined things with recovery attempts had they started
NEVER MAKE DYNAMIC unless you are really knowledgable
Did you clone/backup sometime?
Thats what wrecked HDD with the old Partition Magic - heh
here you go...........
http://www.dynamic-disk.com/adindex.html

fwiw:
when you get things straightened out i would download freeware killdisk 7.1MB CD ISO and burn it to a CD (not DVD), boot to it, and highlight entire drive (80h?) and wipe about 10GB of drive (dont need to do whole thing) just to be safe and be sure that dynamic aint hanging around somewhere (there is always a backup MBR)

Edit:
Since you seem to keep mission critical stuff on your HDD's it might be worthwhile for you to spend $50 and buy Casper V 6.0 hard cloning (not imaging) sw, and set it to reclone to another dedicated HDD every few weeks
 
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so I ran minitool Power Data Recovery......here's what it found for past partitions on this disk...wtf? The list actually goes to 49. I checked out the files on some of them, and they're mostly fragmented images and garbled text documents. Unfortunately none of them are named so it's like a needle in a haystack looking for something I need
partitions.png
 
Matt915 said:
OK, I converted it back to Basic....NOW what do I do?
Click to expand...

So you went to the link I gave you, check?
You paid $29.95 to buy and download the sw that guarantees to change HDD back to basic without your priceless data loss, check?
So, everything went well and you are now back in basic mode, check?

Next I need you to do the diskpart thing again with screenshot
I also need an admin tools\computer management\disk management screenshot
Then in diskmanager I want you to right click the NON SSD drive text
Disk1
Click to expand...
and see does it have a non greyed out option to "initialize disk" or "online" option
If you can initialize or click online ON THE "BAD" HDD do it, wait a few seconds to give it a chance, and reboot

Next I need you to to download PTDD boot iso, extract and burn it to CD (NOT DVD - they need 900MB min) You can use trial vers of UltraIso if you cant figure it out otherwise.

PTDD has a rebuild partition table option we may need

http://www.datafilehost.com/download-5e63ba5a.html

fwiw GetDataBack for NTFS V 4.02 has a raw mode data recovery option which can be used if rebuilding fails totally. Note that the PTDD rebuild action is reversible.

RAW mode means no partition table or MFT (master file table). Its like a book without table of contents, page numbers or paragraph format - just a string of words that has to be reconstructed as the original book form.

I have never failed to recover data from horribly mangled HDD with the help of one or more of these 4 sw
Ptdd
GetDataBack
ZAR (Zero Assumption Recovery)
RecoverMyFiles

Rules of recovery:
>Must run sw in admin mode (right click .exe) possibly even in true admin mode
>Must have all third party AV Firewall off
>In Win 7, must have UAC (User Account Control) slider all the way down
>Must run recovery on target drive FROM ANOTHER BOOTING DRIVE!! This is an absolute must. And save files back to booting drive.

Professional data recov starts at $1600

Edit:
BTW whats up with this 1.5 to 2 day response lag?
 
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here's the screen shot!
diskj.png


diskmanage.png


and there's the disk management screen shot. The disc is back online, and I"m going to get that tool you mentioned now
 
always reboot after HDD properties change to allow for drive letter refresh
you are showing 7 devices
2 HDD
4 USB
1 DVD
You are gonna HAVE to remove the four USB - they are taking drive letters that will CONFUSE THINGS! I sincerely hope they are not external HDD.
Then right click the CDROM 0 in disk manager and change letter to "P" = out of the way

after reboot can you right click the disk0 and change drive letter to D or E?
Why is that HDD active?
Is there an O/S on it?
Were you dual booting?
Did you think you could just have a boot drive, disconnect it and load another drive with O/S and rehook up old drive and everything would be O.K.????
>Do not ignore any of my questions<
Before we do anything with PTDD............

go back to diskpart and give a screenshot after this
sel dis 0
sel par 1
inactive
det par

I also need a screenshot of "computer" while its opened for both disks showing all drives/letters (cntrl panel folder options)

2191k3q.jpg



After the above and I give O.K. we will next do thusly------------
Load your Win 7 DVD and go to where it says install now
the other option is repair my computer
hit that
It may say you need to repair - ignore that
keep going and make sure tools is checked in upper left and then pick startup repair and do it, We dont want the auto repair we want the manually picked one
Then reboot twice

28i2mwz.jpg


PTDD is next to last option
last option is recov sw
 
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The USB devices are actually on one CF card reader, it has multiple slots and they all show up as their own drive. I'll d/c that after I make this post. I renamed the CD-rom. I can't assign a drive letter to the broken hard drive at all. I'm not sure why it's active honestly, I never set that, there was no dual-boot situation, nor was there ever an O/S on it.

here's the disk part screen shot:

disk2o.png


and here's the Computer screen shot
computerl.png
 
also thank you for all your help

edit: also when I boot to the w7 cd, it finds no errors when I do the startup repair
 
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