Drive will not boot reported as RAW by chkdsk

[nortelfan]

I have a laptop drive that will not boot at all. I moved the drive to an external usb cage and I can access the data on the drive which is in a partition about 18gig in size that reports as ntfs in disk management.

The problem I see is there is 141mb before this partition that is shown as unallocated. I tried chkdsk /f on the drive and it says the drive is Raw and I cannot run chkdsk.

Any ideas what happened and how to fix this. I could salvage the data, but I would like to get my drive back up and running without losing all my programs.

Thanks in advance

 

[braddds]

Many laptop mfg's load a diagnostic and/or recovery partition that is hidden unless you run another utility to discover it. My guess is that this is your situation. The problem with this setup is that it may only be for recovery back to factory original. Meaning you'll lose all your data and programs that were installed afterwards. Backup all your data before doing anything.

If your laptop came with a recovery cd/floppy you should be able to use it to access this hidden RAW partition. It may contain your operating system (OS) install. If not, find or purchase a copy of your OS and try to re-install or repair over the old system. It'll at least get you back up with your data and programs but you'll have to add all the updates again.

Try a google search for more info about your laptop and recovery procedures. Also contact the laptop mfg for further assistance as they may have more detailed advice.

Cheers

 

[nortelfan]

Thanks for the info. I kind of thought that may be the case. In the mean time I have been trying to copy files from the drive with some luck. Many of the files say cannot read from source disk. I can browse the entire drive, but not all the data seems to be accessible.

 

[jimp56]

if you cant get all the data by regular copy and need to, and can spend $80, then a program called "getdataback" should be able to recover all the data.