Once NTFS hard drive now RAW

Egon

Active Member
I've got a 750GB Seagate internal hard drive that turned RAW on me a while ago. I've got some time to work on it now so I figured I'd ask around around for ideas on how to fix it or at least recover some files.

It has three partitions, one for recovery, one to boot Windows 7, and one for files. The boot and files partitions are RAW while the recovery seems okay in the disk management but freezes if I try to use it. I can see the partition names too.

If I boot the hard drive like normal hooked up internally it'll get to the Windows 7 logo and reboot a split second after it started to animate in. If I try to boot to setup repair it'll go through the two "Loading Windows Files..." loading bars and just freeze on a black screen after everything loads.

If I hook the hard drive up via USB Windows tells me that it needs to be formatted for use since it is a RAW hard drive. CHKDSK wont touch it since it's in a RAW state.

If I hook it up internally as a slave drive I cannot access it without formatting the thing. I've booted to the master disk's setup repair and tried DISKPART on it but DISKPART can't find the RAW hard drive. I've tried Bootrec on it and all Bootrec does is give me options of different commands I can use with it.
I've tried running ****** and R-Studio on it but they both couldn't find any files.

I've booted into Parted Magic and tried Testdisk on it. It finds the recovery partition and the boot partition. A deeper scan finds the file partition but when I search it the drive disconnects. Photorec does much the same thing. ClonePart wont clone the disk to a different disk either.

I've tried ddrescue and much the same thing happens in the case of Testdisk.
I've tried rebuilding the MBR but that doesn't help. The controller board is perfectly fine. The drive makes no weird or out of place sounds and spins up just like a normal drive should.

I'm out of ideas at this point.
 

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
Download seatools for dos and test the drive and see what the results are first. You'll have to create the bootable cd.
 

TrainTrackHack

VIP Member
Perhaps give Recuva a shot? It's a file recovery program, I've had good luck with it in the past even with partitions that were so shot beyond recovery they were no longer detected. I wouldn't be too optimistic given the drive is playing up with other recovery tools, but who knows.
 
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