All of a sudden MY DATA DRIVE BECAME "RAW"

[telomostro]

I have this PIII/700MHz running Win XP Pro SP2.
I have 2 physicall drives, the first is C: and I use it just for OS and Apps, the second D: I use it only for data.
I disconnected this computer from my office and I relocated it at home and when I turned the computer on, the data drive had lost its name (now it was just a "Local Disk") and when you double click it it says that the disk is not formatted and if you look at the properties it says

Used Space: 0 Bytes
Free Space: 0 Bytes
File System: RAW

Now... in that drive I had (or should I say I HAVE hopefully) ALL my invoices, Quick Books, Forms, Proposals, Contracts, I mean it's a TOTAL DISASTER, can anyone help me pleeeeeaaaaassseeee......?

 

[glio]

Have you recovered all the files yet? Same thing happened to me yesterday and now I lost almost everything... I hope you've fixed the drive and please share with me your experience if you've fixed the drive.

 

[telomostro]

Glio... unfortunately I have not been successfull with my drive, I have gone as far as Zip Locking it and put it in the freezer.... Really! I read that in an article, I also banged it with a hammer well.... maybe I should say "tapped" it (read that in another forum) but nothing has worked so far, havn't given up though...
Good luck to you too.

 

[satrow]

@ telomostro - why have you gone to the extreme of freezing your drive already? I see no reason to assume that that will work in this instance (and that's from someone who's been through the troubleshooting processes with a drive, advised freezing and actually pulled the data from the drive successfully!)!

As for tapping it with a hammer ... it was an occasional fix a long time ago when drives where prone to 'sticktion' but rarely any good with modern drives!

How big is this drive? What file system? Is it encrypted? Did it have anything like GoBack installed? Drive overlay software? Have you tried replacing it in the original machine?

Please sit back and give us all the information you can before deciding what route to take - you may have made it impossible to recover all your data by your actions already ...

 

[telomostro]

Hey Satrow... thanx for answering, you say: "why have you gone to the extreme of freezing your drive already?" but the reality is that "already" is after posting my problem here and not being able to get any guidance from anyone in over 3 months. As time goes by the data in my bad drive is starting to become either obsolete or has been replaced or rebuilt and some unfortunately will be forever lost so after a coupla month waiting for "the light" I had to recur to whatever were my "last hope" solutions.

As for the drive it is a Fireball 30GB and inside it has 2 partitions, one NTFS (O.S. and Apps) and the other one FAT32 (data) They are not encrypted, and nothing like GoBack and yes I have tried in the original machine.

If you have any idea and I have not screwed up anything in a definite way please let me know and thanx a lot!

 

[satrow]

Have you tried any file recovery software on it?

If so, which one(s)?

 

[telomostro]

yes:

1. HDD Regenerator
2. NTFSDOS
3. PCI Filerecovery
4. Undisker
5. Outlook repair
6. PDF advance repair (with wich I was able to recover about half of my invoices)

For the rest I did not use any software or software module that would change in anyway my files in a permanent way

 

[satrow]

So you had some success with PDF advance repair?

Your invoices were ok, readable? Only the small file sizes pdfs were recoverable?

None of the other found anything?

 

[glio]

... I've given up to recover files on my own... a few data recovery centers out there guarantee me with a 99% recovery rate... but they charge me for $80~$100 for a single hard drive recovery. Anyone of you out there know what they do to recover files? Do you think they can re-link those fragmented files?

... I know nothing about data recovery myself. Google doesn't seem to give me much information on that.

I tried GetDataBack, in fact, I tried quite a number of recovery utilites... most of them found the files, but the recovered files are not readable... or too fragmented to be recovered.

(sigh)... I'm willing to sacrifice my life to recover those files. My wife's already found out about the hard drive... and it contains my wedding photos.

Please help...

 

[Grenage]

I the files on the drive are really that precious, I would recommend the professional recovery service. After all, if you're willing to sacrifice your life for them, $80 isn't so bad.


Carlsberg don't run I.T departments, but if they did they'd probably be more fun.