Recover from a RAW partition?

L

[L]imey

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 9, 2009
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Hey guys,

I am trying to help a friend who has an HP laptop that the hard drive seems to have failed.

It's a 1tb 2.5 drive that has several partitions on it. The big one with all the data, about 900 gigs, shows up as RAW and wants to be formatted.

This is of course the one that had all her data on it.

Anyone have any suggestions for a utility that might be able to recover the data?

Thanks in advance.
 
If a drive is failing usually first step is to clone the drive somehow. Least get the data off before it gets any worse. Then you can mess around with trying to recover files.

I don't really know of what tools to use for cloning on Windows, like Ghost or whatever does but not sure how it handles potentially failing hdd.

Like on linux you can use dd_rescue but its not very user friendly.

But once you get your cloned drive you can mess around with trying to get actual files off it. Something like:
http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Or any data recovery program to get actual data off. You can try whatever without worrying that the HDD is going to completely fail.
 
It's ok, I have it hooked up via usb to my desktop at the moment.

Checking out R Studio now.

Everything else I've tried has told me to format the disk before it could recognize it. LOL that was the whole point of trying the recovery software, to not have to format.
 
R studio is throwing CRC errors continuously. I think the drive itself is boned. My friend is super pissed. She sent the laptop in to HP once before and they "replaced" the hard drive. I'll bet they either just formatted it and copied the data back, or used another refurbished drive and sent it back to her. She's lost a ton of work files now. I feel bad, but I don't think there's anything I can do if the drive is throwing these CRC errors at me, doesn't that pretty much indicate hardware failure?
 
Sounds about right.

Take the time to teach your friend to backup, use dropbox or some other solution.
 
hotcrandel said:
Sounds about right.

Take the time to teach your friend to backup, use dropbox or some other solution.
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Agreed, but this is typically not a lesson people (read non-[H] people) learn until after they've had their first hardware failure.

Anyway, she went and bought a mac desktop because the guy at bestbuy convinced her that their hard drives don't fail.

She's got an external hard drive now, but it's a bit too late. Thanks for all the ideas.
 
SirMaster said:
I have had great success in the past with http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizardpro/

It definitely has a mode that works on RAW disks. They have a trial to see if it works for you. But it's not cheap, but some data is priceless.
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I gave this a shot, and it told me to format the raw partition before it could help me.

LOL

No Sorry that's wrong. This one doesn't even recognize the physical drive. It only shows me my working drives, not the one with the problem.
 
I had this happen twice to clients, both times worked out fine.
What I'd do:
1. use DD or another cloning program to create an image of the damaged partition and/or whole drive onto another drive, just so you can retry your attempts if something worse happens (may or may not work depending on the nature of the hdd problem)
2a. use a live cd of Windows, or maybe the installer, and try to do a 'chkdsk /f ' on the RAW drive. It should actually try to work with the partition anyway and possibly make it readable again.
2b. once I used a linux live cd and forcibly set the partition type to ntfs using cfdisk. It's probably the 'worse' way, but it did work for me.
 
[L]imey;1040292281 said:
I gave this a shot, and it told me to format the raw partition before it could help me.

LOL

No Sorry that's wrong. This one doesn't even recognize the physical drive. It only shows me my working drives, not the one with the problem.
Click to expand...

I find that very strange. Are you sure you selected the correct recovery mode? You tried both complete recovery and partition recovery?

I have certainly recovered data off of a few disks that Windows wanted to format and which did not have valid partitions or volumes.
 
SirMaster said:
I find that very strange. Are you sure you selected the correct recovery mode?

I have certainly recovered data off of a few disks that Windows wanted to format and which did not have valid partitions or volumes.
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Yes I'm sure.

If I choose the last option (partition recovery) then there's a grayed out image of the drive with no information available. When I choose the middle option (the one for raw recovery) the drive isn't available to work with.
 
Getdataback is what you want to use.

I have recently tried multiple other recovery programs, and they all suck compared to Getdataback.

It has been around for years, and has only gotten better.

You will want a separate drive to recover to.

Hook up the failed drive as a slave as well as the drive you are going to recover to.

The choose the appropriate option in Getdataback and let it do it's thing. For a drive that large, it will probably take a few hours to do a complete scan of that one partition. You should then be able to recover the needed files.
 
cyclone3d said:
Getdataback is what you want to use.

I have recently tried multiple other recovery programs, and they all suck compared to Getdataback.

It has been around for years, and has only gotten better.

You will want a separate drive to recover to.

Hook up the failed drive as a slave as well as the drive you are going to recover to.

The choose the appropriate option in Getdataback and let it do it's thing. For a drive that large, it will probably take a few hours to do a complete scan of that one partition. You should then be able to recover the needed files.
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Error 23 when run against the offending partition.

Seems more and more like hardware failure.
 
You could look at Spinrite to attempt to resolve the h/w errors. But definitely a last resort thing. See http://www.myharddrivedied.com/blog/why-spinrite-not-my-data-recovery-software-list

I'd leave it on overnight with whatever tool you decide to use. As long as you are seeing a RAW partition I would have thought you could get something back.

Incidentally, if possible I would connect it up via a SATA lead in your desktop. Usually its far faster (unless you have USB3 I suppose) and personally I don't trust those portable caddies that much!

Good luck.
 
If you're comfortable with Linux my usual goto for recovering data is to mount the drive or partition (read only) and run foremost agains the /dev file for that disk. It'll search through the raw bytes and spit out anything it finds based on file headers. Can come up with some false positives but it organizes things by suspected file type.
 
Well, I would like to refer Kernel for Windows Data Recovery Software to repair your corrupted partition which becomes 'RAW'. To know more about the windows data recovery software you can visit http://www.freedatarecoverysoftware.org
 
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