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wisconsinpcFlag for United States of America

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Hard drive data corrupt - now reporting RAW partition....HELP!!!

ok...this is a long one, and somewhat complicated, but here goes.

I have a hard drive that was working perfectly and doesnt seem to have any errors on it at all - except for all of a sudden the drive shows up as 0 bytes capacity.  When you go into the Windows 2003 Server storage manager (as it is a second drive) it shows that the 80gb drive has about 40gb used - but the partition type is RAW.

I need to get the data back on this drive - it is a customer that has no backup and I know the data integrity is there - just have to get it back.

MUCHOS PUNTOS will be awarded to the first person who gives me a fast accurate answer.

Chris
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datarecoveryman

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Is that Ontrack Data Recovery Professional software any good?

Thanks!

Chris
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nobus
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Just use " Get Data Back for NTFS ", available from www.runtime.org , like nobus said before.

It's easy to use, low resource and very, very effective.

Best Regards an Good Luck !
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docey

even if you get your data back, copy it directly to a different drive (2e disk in the same system prefered)
then go to the manufactuers website and download a drive diagnostic tool they usaly ask you to reboot
in dos modus so might need some floppy present. then run a full test on the harddisk and check for any
errors.

NTFS partition don't just get corrupted like FAT tables do. most times this is a sign for a dying disk. and
it you don't want this to repeat in the future you better check the disk. i had a disk of mine wich lost 5
complete NTFS partitions in 6 months. the problem was that the motor spinning the disks arround was
to slow accellerating thinking the drivehead was at possition to begin writing where it was not du to this
delay. thus writing a regular file right over the partion table. because not all write opperations are in
this area of the disk it may take some time before the next partion suddenly disappears. mine was for
about 80% destroyed. also one of my partions became a zombie or something like that. it says its there
so windows thinks it can use it but then finds a half destroyed filesystem and hangs making recovery
nearly impossable. for large storage partions i use fat32 since it can be read from and linux where
NTFS can only be read from windowsNT/2000/XP no one else can understand it.

its worth to check that disk before returning it in full operation and have the same problems in a few
months again because the disk is dying. then its time to replace the disk. since its 40Gb its not new
and you most likely have no warrenty. usaly you have about 2 years but these discs arent in
production anymore for more then 3 years now i gues. hope it help you prevent future problems and
just go on with datarecovery and once recovered BACKUP IT UP AT ONCE!! i lost 280GB because of not doing just that. now planning for a raid 5 system. but thats proffessional stuff.

cYa!
Docey, from the netherlands with its capitol amsterdam(many don't know that).

hi
if your problem exist,
try R-studio it was very helpful in same situation for me (but not win 2003)
let me know what did you do,I had such problems too.

J.Ekrami

hi docey here,

since the drives where only 1 year old i send them back for replacment , must be a factory problem.
btw it where 2 160GB drives in a raid 0 setup and both drives have a slightly differt variant of the error.
the partion is destroyed across both 2 disks in a different way and i have tried serveral recovery tools
but it seems that only having the disks on-line is already damaging them so i have taken them offline
and safed the most important parts of it from other backups. there going back to the shop in a few
day's and hope il get replacement drives.

btw it seems more 160gb drives contain factory problems where 200GB are flawless. it could have
something to do with the charistics coupled with 160GB(windows drivers?, BIOS LBA design Fault?).
i'm now going for 200GB disks anyway because i want serial-ATA hotswap.

so thats about my story, hope someone finds it usefull and don't forgets to backup directly after it was restored, 2 day's after i had been succesfully recovering the complete disks begin to fall apeart.
the was no way stop it execpt then to shutdown the disk.

cYa!!
Docey.

Hello Chris and all others,

For your own sake, do not believe that this is a simple hardware matter, fixed by buying a new hard disk etc, or testing one million of different hints on possible solutions, requiring weeks of your spare time and the costly replacement of most parts of your computer. That probably solves nothing! It may well be that it is a matter of the hard disk vendors, or the vendors of the USB and Firewire HD boxes, in the sense that they need to communicate better with Microsoft. I mean ,there is obviously some imcompality (driver, firmware etc.) issue introduced by SP2 that needs to be solved. This is not something that we, the ordinary users, can fix. Read more about my experiences of this failure (i. e. some more detailed specs, conditions and behaviour descriptions) and my testing of recovery programs at

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/21223546/file-system-in-HD-suddenly-converted-to-RAW-from-NTFS.html
AND
https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/21424921/Cheaper-of-free-alternatives-to-stellar-phoenix-ntfs.html

Then you realise that it is Bill that should be billed (I promise, I will not change b for another letter!). Just to mention it shortly here as well, for data recovery I sincerely recommend

* Magic Recovery Professional at www.software-recovery.com *

It is not a cheap program for the non-professional's wallet (USD 100) but works fast and perfectly in a manner visually similar to Explorer. It managed to safely and quickly restore 102 GB of media files otherwise lost on one of my daughter's external hard disks. I tested four other programs but none of the others did that job well enough to talk about satisfying recovery.

Final comment: I still have no answer on why my daughter's, and later also my son's, external hard disks (various brands) could not be read or even reformatted as externals again after clean installations of XP SP2. Being used as internal IDE-disks, they all work perfectly.

Best regards
Staffan
A Swedish computer freak