RAW HDD, panic! :)

mr.doom

Member
So, after few months Western Digital bricked the access to my hdd with the new firmware update (MyBook Live). Issue is not new, but completely unresolved so far. I was told to RMA it back.

I could just do so, but I will loose all the data (a lot). Most of it are super important documents and pictures.

Before I send it I opened the casing, slotted the drive into an external enclosure and voil... wait a minute - it shows as RAW hard drive and it wants me to format it! I am running Windows 8 Pro 64-bit.

Question is: how can I convert the drive to NTFS? I tried the usual "convert" trick. It is not working. Alternatively, how do I access the hdd to get the data off of it and then I can format it in peace?

Thanks for the help, all I find on the net is from 2006 or earlier :)
 
If it's showing up as RAW, then that means your data is lost. You could try some things though.

Boot to a LiveCD of PartedMagic and see if you can access your data that way.

You could also try running Recuva on it to see if you can recover any data.
 
If it's showing up as RAW, then that means your data is lost. You could try some things though.

Boot to a LiveCD of PartedMagic and see if you can access your data that way.

You could also try running Recuva on it to see if you can recover any data.

Thanks. I tried Recuva, to no avail. Now scanning with something called Damaged Partition Recovery (miniTool Power Data Recovery). It's currently scanning he partition and it will take at least 9 more hours. If this doesn't work, I'll try that other option you mentioned. I will update tomorrow.
 
Try running photorec. We had some success with that at my work place. We use it on a Fedora machine so not sure what platforms it works on.
 
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