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AaronDitto

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NTFS Partition is now a RAW Partition

I have a 160Gb Maxtor Hard Drive that I use as a "Storage Drive" separate from my boot drive , which is a 80Gbx2 Raid 0 stripe setup. I went to remove my 160Gb Drive one day from it's drive enclosure while my machine was on still (thought maybe I could use it as a "hot swappable drive") and that has now caused the 160Gb drive to report the partition as a "Raw or Unknown" file system type under Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

I was wondering if there was a partition utilitiy program that can restore this drive to the way it was and correct the file system problem on the drive, without losing the data that is on it. I've tried using chkdsk and it reports the drive as a FAT32 partition, and chkdsk then crashes, or says that it can't continue in read only mode. When I try and access the drive under Windows it hangs the machine for a few min then says that the Drive needs to be Formatted. I of course do not want to do this, so I cancel out of it, and the drive remains the same.

I've been unable to view the drive for months now, and every utility or tool or technique I've tried to use so far as failed.
If anyone has any advice or could help with this I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
Aaron Ditto
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craylord

Check out PC Inspector File Recovery

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

It's freeware for starters.
i like Get data back for NTFS

http://www.runtime.org/

they also have a RAID reconstructor for just such a situation although I have not used it
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Neither of those programs worked.
Both come up saying erros with irrelevant error numbers saying it can't access a specific sector on the disk. I let one run for about 2 hours, and it still hadn't found anything, and the drive was close to full before this happened (had approx 5 gigs still left)

I'm running out of ideas. I know the drive still works, there shouldn't be any physical damage to it, it mearly has lost the one thing windows needs on the disc to read it. Windows XP reads it as being a RAW partition, I'm going to try and pop it into my Linux box and see if it can read it, but then my only problem would be figuring out where to put the data temporarily till I can format the drive again and move everything back. If anyone else has any ideas I would greatly appreciate it.
I have figured out a solution for this problem.

I appreciate everyon's help.

Here is what I used...

http://www.stellarinfo.com/

a little pricey, but great tools, and worked perfectly.
Good suggestion for anyone else that has this problem.
Evalution scans to see what is recoverable...
Which is good enough proof for me to purchase a product knowing that it will work.
Aaron
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modulo

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