RAW Drive Data Recovery

[ElectroPulse]

Hello, all!

I've got a 500GB drive that all of a sudden decided it didn't like being NTFS, and instead became RAW...

Anyway, no attempts to view the data have been successful. It was recommended to use a Linux livecd to see if I could mount it, and unfortunately I cannot.

I have been using the tools in PartedMagic to try and recover the information.

First off, the "Disk Health" tool says that the "Overall Health Self-Assessment Test" passed. There is one entry under "Error Log." If you believe this could prove helpful (says "Lifetime hours: 1150,state: active or idle, type: interface CCRC error, Command aborted, Details: at LBA = 0x086c7df0 = 141327856") I can try typing it all in... Since it's a livecd I can't install guest additions to share clipboard.

Next, according to Testdisk, the boot sector is fine (said it's ok, and that it and the backup boot sector are identical).

Also using Testdisk, (following this tutorial: http://html5.litten.com/how-to-fix-external-disk-drive-suddenly-became-raw/), I tried analyzing the drive. Using the Quick Search, it did not ask if it was made in Win Vista or 7, as is stated in the tutorial. It also takes like half a second to complete the quick search before displaying two partitions. One is the big partition with all my data, and the other is a 55mb partition that has no problems. When I have the big partition selected and hit "P," it simply says "Can't open filesystem. Filesystem seems damaged." With the other smaller, working partition it lists the files.

Upon running a Deeper Search, it says "Analyse Cylinder X/60800." It runs through this at a tolerable rate, and by my calculations should take about 15 hours or so. Unfortunately, once it gets to about 1800/60800, it starts giving some error for every one, and it takes about 30 seconds to proceed to the next number... I gave up on this after a few hours, as it was making next to no progress.

***If you have any recommendations for how to proceed with repairing the filesystem, feel free to let me know. However, at this point I have about given up with that idea and am wanting to recover my data to another drive, format the original drive, and copy it back on.

So, I have downloaded EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, not knowing that the trial didn't allow you to recover anything. I ran that for a half hour or so and cancelled it to see if it was actually finding anything. It had gone through about 1/3 of the information, and was doing a good job of it, it looks like. It was around this time that I found out that in order to recover anything I needed to drop $70. Since I am living on a super low income at the moment, this is unfortunately not an option.

I tried Photorec (came with PartedMagic), but unfortunately it does not recover file names. This is not an option either, as there ain't a snowball's chance in hell I'm going through 500gb of random files and renaming them all.

Any recommendations for good (free) programs to recover files from RAW filesystems? The program I've used in the past for file recovery was Recuva, but unfortunately this did not work in this situation. I've looked for alternatives, but don't know which one works the best, and it would take hours downloading several and trying them (mainly because of our super slow internet).

Thanks!
ElectroPulse

 

[Warrior]

I recommend ZAR, It helped me recover a LOT from a drive I had lost. I ended up buying a copy because it was so good.

 

[MrGuvernment]

r-tools for me.

but i have always been able to get a RAW drive back to working, was always a bad MBR record.

 

[ElectroPulse]

Thanks for the replies!

I recommend ZAR, It helped me recover a LOT from a drive I had lost. I ended up buying a copy because it was so good.

Unfortunately the free version has a similar limitation to the free version of EaseUS (which is limited to 1GB of recovery)... It limits it to 4 folders of recovery.

r-tools for me.

but i have always been able to get a RAW drive back to working, was always a bad MBR record.

Again, unusable unless you purchase it... Limited to files <64kb.



I just edited the OP to include the word "free" as a requirement... I figured the whole "It was around this time that I found out that in order to recover anything I needed to drop $70. Since I am living on a super low income at the moment, this is unfortunately not an option." would make that a given.

 

[houkouonchi]

Op if you want you can hit me up in AIM or gtalk IM (gtalk is my username here @gmail.com) and I could check it out for you if you can get it running riplinux or something where I can ssh into it.

Willing to take a look if you want. I have done a lot of data recovery in my day although its primarily been from failed raid arrays but that has included recovering data from individual disks as well. I know my dad one time had the same thing happen to him (his NTFS file-system was just listed as a raw disk) and I was able to recover 99.8% of the data. There was some ntfs meta-data corruption which caused windows to refuse to read the fs at all.

You can PM me for my AIM if you wanna go that route.

 

[ElectroPulse]

Op if you want you can hit me up in AIM or gtalk IM (gtalk is my username here @gmail.com) and I could check it out for you if you can get it running riplinux or something where I can ssh into it.

Willing to take a look if you want. I have done a lot of data recovery in my day although its primarily been from failed raid arrays but that has included recovering data from individual disks as well. I know my dad one time had the same thing happen to him (his NTFS file-system was just listed as a raw disk) and I was able to recover 99.8% of the data. There was some ntfs meta-data corruption which caused windows to refuse to read the fs at all.

You can PM me for my AIM if you wanna go that route.

Thank you for the offer! PM sent. EDIT: Hmm... It isn't showing in my "sent" box. Did you get it?


Still open to recommendations for free recovery software, though.

 

[pLu]

I've saved a lot of Windows disks using GNU ddrescue and Linux.

Copy/rescue the partition (not the whole disk) so it later can be easily loopback mounted as a read-only NTFS disk in Linux.

ddrescue copies the good parts of the disk first, zeroing in on the bad blocks and eventually retries the bad blocks a specified number of times.

After copying the files from the rescued partition you can use the partition as a raw image in VMware Player Plus. Boot Windows from a (new) virtual disk and run checkdisk on the rescued partition.

Loopback mount the partition again and give it a final try.

 

[jermysingh]

Here is an application would be help you, this tool help us in our case. Go through free version to recover data. http://www.recoverydeletedfiles.com/

 

[sybreeder]

I don't see that anyone mentioned - have you run chkdsk before you decided to use testdisk ?
Most of the time plain chkdsk would fix that partition. I had similar problem and after error scan everything was back to normal.

 

[houkouonchi]

I don't see that anyone mentioned - have you run chkdsk before you decided to use testdisk ?
Most of the time plain chkdsk would fix that partition. I had similar problem and after error scan everything was back to normal.

I would highly recommend *against* running chkdsk unless integrity of the actual HD has been comfirmed and that the HD does not have bad sectors/unreadable data.

 

[drescherjm]

I would highly recommend *against* running chkdsk unless integrity of the actual HD has been comfirmed and that the HD does not have bad sectors/unreadable data.

I second this. chkdisk can make a bad situation much worse.