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External Disk Drive Suddenly Became RAW – Unknown Kadath. UPDATED How To Fix: External Disk Drive Suddenly Became RAWDISCLAIMER: These examples use techniques that I actually employ in the real world to deal with real problems. They might be wrong or dangerous. They might be inefficient. If you try them yourself, it might cause damage or irreparable loss. I take no responsibility for anything you do based on my examples or the information that I provide here. It has been well over a year since last updating my post on .
It can be a breathtaking experience to suddenly be told that your data, often irreplaceable pictures and documents, might be gone forever. As with many similar situations in life the appropriate response is “Don’t panic”. When approached sensibly and carefully, the situation can be resolved and the data saved more times than not. Here we will look at the causes, fixes and preventative measures for instances involving external drives being used with Windows XP and Windows Vista/7/8. Error Messages. Common error messages associated with the sudden inability to access an external hard disk drive. When attempting to access the drive in Windows you may see a message asking you to format the drive DO NOT FORMAT THE DRIVEYou need to format the disk in drive before you can use it. Do you want to format it?
Hey guys,So I have a Seagate 3TB External Hard Drive that all of a sudden tells me it needs to be formatted. All I did prior to this happening was restart my PC, the.
After 20 hours of new research and testing, we found the best external desktop hard drive for most people is Seagate’s 4 TB Backup Plus Desktop Drive. Trying to format a large external USB or Firewire hard drive to the FAT32 file system? Can’t do it? Only see an option for formatting the drive using the N.
Another error that you may see when trying to access the drive in Windows from a program or the command line is. Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and that the volume is not corrupted. Attempting to run chkdsk in an attempt to repair the problem will give an error also.
Therefore all the available filesystem drivers are unable to mount the filesystem as a drive. This often happens when the records determining the filesystem type or location on the disk are damaged or corrupted, usually the partition table or the boot sector. Since Windows sees no filesystem in the partition, it prompts you to format it in order to create a filesystem on it.
DO NOT FORMAT IT. Why does it happen and how to avoid it. The most common cause of external hard drives suddenly becoming RAW drives is if they are disconnected from a computer without using the “Safely Remove Hardware” option. This can happen in many ways such as a power failure, unplugging the drive from the USB port or from its AC adapter, a problem with the computer that causes it to temporarily disconnect the USB hubs and many more circumstances can lead to this occurring. Always use “Safely remove hardware” to disconnect the drive.
Left click the icon on the taskbar, select the device from the menu, and wait for the confirmation message. How do you fix it. For this example, I chose the most heavily damaged disk with this issue that I could find in my collection of damaged disks.
It has both of the most common problems. The partition table is corrupted and the boot sector of the main partition is also scrambled. The pictures of error messages above all came from this drive.
The pictures of the repair process below are from the actual repair of this drive. Some images are from a virtual machine (simply to make it easier to get the screenshots) and some are from an actual desktop.
This is a real repair not a manufactured example. Before proceeding beyond this point, you need to be aware of the risks involved. If the problem with the drive is not simply a logical error but is a manifestation of physical damage then the more you use it and try to repair, the worse the damage may become. To minimize the risks, the drive can be taken to a professional who is experienced in this type of repair. The drive should not be making strange clicking or beeping noises.
That means that there is definitely physical damage and it should be sent to a facility with the proper tools and environment to repair/recover it since trying to repair it as described in this post can make that situation worse. If you wish to continue on your own there are three important rules to remember. Computer problems are variable. You may very well come up with a different situation than I outline below.
Make sure that you stop and think things through carefully when the process becomes different than I describe. You DO NOT WANT TO WRITE ANYTHING TO THE RAW DRIVE except for the repaired MBR and repaired Boot Sector if necessary. Any other writing can overwrite data on the drive that you would want to keep. This repair does not apply to solid- state drives (SSD).
They are very different than normal drives and can erase important data on a RAW partition just by connecting power to them. BEFORE PROCEEDING YOU MUST TRY TO DETERMINE IF THERE IS PHYSICAL DAMAGEIf there is physical damage, then consider sending the drive to a professional recovery service since physical damage often continues to degrade the data and simply powering on the drive may make data become irretrievable. Accessing and Assessing a Hard Drive’s S. M. A. R. T. Data to Determine if There is Physical Damage.
Being able to effectively analyze the S. M. A. R. T. The primary purpose of S. M. A. R. T. When a hard drive reports that the S. M. A. R. T. DATA AND CALCULATE VALUES AND TOLERANCES DIFFERENTLY.
S. M. A. R. T. For specifics, the hard drive’s technical documentation must be consulted. Sometimes that information is difficult to come by and can be proprietary.
For example, the formulas for how some manufacturers calculate normalized values for attributes can be very difficult to find. Wikipedia entry for S. M. A. R. T. Proper analysis of S. M. A. R. T. That means that there is definitely physical damage and it should be sent to a facility with the proper tools and environment to repair/recover it. The drive needs to be accessible by the computer’s BIOS during POST (responds to the ATA command IDENTFY. In other words, the drive should be visible in Windows.
In the case of external drives connected via USB they need to be detected by the computer’s Plug and Play software (responds to the ATA command IDENTFY. Then you can rule out physical damagethat requires repair with specialized tools in a controlled environment.
What We Are Looking For. Physical damage may require the drive to be sent to a facility with theproper tools and equipment to recover the data. Short Self- Test? We run the S. M. A. R. T. Short Self- Test. If it does not pass any of these tests, you need to take it to a data recovery lab and have it professionally recovered otherwise you risk making things worse.
View S. M. A. R. T. If it does not pass the test then there is physical damage. Repair partition table and boot sector.
This can take many hours, even days, to run on large hard drives bigger than 5. GBWhen I first wrote this guide, 1. TB drives were very rare. Now they are quite common.
Be aware that this can take a very long time to run. You can do other stuff on your computer while it runs as long as it is not something that tries to use the bad drive. If there is physical damage, then consider sending the drive to a professional recovery service since physical damage often continues to degrade the data and simply powering on the drive may make data become irretrievable. If there is no indication of physical damage then you can continue. In order to repair the most common problems that cause an external disk to suddenly become RAW we will use Test. Disk. Download Testdiskhttp: //www. Test. Disk. If that is the case, select EFI GPT instead and try that.)Select Analyse and hit enter.
The partition data looks incorrect (an explanation of why is beyond the scope of this article)Select Quick Search and hit enter. Say . We’ll need to look further. Press. Qto go back a screen and then pressenter. IF YOU SEE ALL YOUR FILES THEN SKIP THE DEEPER SEARCH AND GO TO THE STEP DESCRIBING SELECTING WRITETo get to this screen, select DEEPER SEARCH and press enter. Naturally, the Deeper Search takes longer than the Quick Search.
When the Deeper Search completes we now see two partitions. The one we saw after the quick search and another one.
Select the new partition and press. Pto see the files/folders and now we see the data we want to make visible again. Press. Qto go back a screen and then press enter to get to this screen. Select WRITE and press enter in order to write our new partition table to the drive. DO NOT WRITE A NEW PARTITION TABLE IF YOU DID NOT SEE YOUR FILES/FOLDERS That means the proper partition table was not found and you will have to try a different technique to recover your data.
Press Y to confirm that you want to write the new partition table. As I mentioned at the start of this repair, this disk also has corruption in the boot sector of the partition that we are trying to make visible again. When this is the case Test. Disk will stop at this point and ask you to fix it before it finishes writing the new partition table. If the backup boot sector is good (as in this case) simply choose BACKUP BS and press enter. In the event that the backup boot sector is also bad then choose REBUILD BS.
Press Y to confirm the boot sector repair. Then choose QUIT and press enter.
Regardless of whether a boot sector repair is required or not, you will end up at this screen where all you can do is press enter. Then hit Q until you are out of Test. Disk. Now reboot the computer to see if the drive is now visible.
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Thanks,James. Here are the results for the drive used in this example. Go to the TOOLS tab and click CHECK NOW. Check both options and click START. This is my favorite external drive for making backups since it is reliable, rugged and does not encrypt your data without your permission. I use these myself. Hopefully, this solves your problem. Please feel free to contact me through the contact form or comments if you have any questions or suggestions for this post.
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