removable disk showing RAW

hey guys,

my friend has a gopro hero3 and she wants to get some footage off the camera onto her windows 7 PC. problem is when she connects the camera the windows dialog comes up saying the disk e: needs to be formatted before use, obviously this would delete the footage which we want to avoid

in my computer the device shows up as only removable disk e: yet in disk management there are three separate entries for e:, not partitions, 3 e's, all of which are healthy volumes, primary partitions and 30MB in size. yes 30MB! and here's the problem, where it says NTFS for the computers hard drive, the camera shows up as RAW.

I have tried literally everything I can think of, and numerous disk recovery tools, all of which seem to throw up no files

the camera has worked before in someone else's hands, however they did it on a mac - yet I cannot forsee a problem with this as it should still really be a universal format given its a gopro camera

any idea

thanks
tom

maccaquacker said:

hey guys,..........the camera has worked before in someone else's hands, however they did it on a mac - yet I cannot forsee a problem with this as it should still really be a universal format given its a gopro camera

any idea

thanks
tom

:) How well or not so well it worked in someone else's hands, do you know?

As of Feb 2013, many users have complained about Gopro3 - their SD Cards especially the 64GB ones suddenly turning unreadable and their losing all the data. There seems to be a camera level problem which GoPro seems to have acknowledged and hopefully working to resolve the problem with an updated firmware.

Have a look at this thread. GoPro HERO3 Black - Keeps telling me there is no SD Card

That's only to keep you informed so that you can follow up the developments.

I would now think you are direly in need of a recovery effort. How successful its gonna be, I cannot foretell.

Now forget about connecting your camera to the PC and try doing anything. (Unless GoPro resolves the problem, you are not going to get anywhere - though you can try so many things with the SD Card you want to use that hopefully keep the aberrations in check. I shall come to it when this problem is resolved oneway or the other. )

Pull out the MicroSD card, put it in an adapter and plug it into your PC(using a good card reader if need be.). ( Do tell us the capacity class and make, how old/new it is and whether you had ever successfully copied/moved your photos/videos on to the PC etc., etc., just for our information)

Now go ahead and put out the screenshots. Let us see it and formulate our ideas on recovery.

I am only a follower in this thread, leaving Kaktussoft and Britton30 in the lead. I just butted in to say no camera connection to the PC. :)

Recently, I have noticed that when moving disks between different machines the hard drives (in my case) always show up as raw on the new machines. All of these hard drives when placed back on the original machine all work as they should. When you look at computer management they show up as NTFS as they should, and when you open explorer all the files can be accessed. CHKDSK shows no errors of any sort on the drive and a look at the s.m.a.r.t. statistics show nothing of concern. After checking out the drive one last time, I remove for the machine (Win7 Enterprise 64 bit in this case), and connect it to a different machine (Win7 Pro, 64 bit), the drive shows as RAW once again and windows states formatting is required.
Therefore I am thinking the is a Windows issue and not hardware, since it happens on different machines but when the drive goes back to the original machine all is fine (no format required all files readable). One thing to note in every case these are not external USB drives but internal SATA drives being moved. In one case the dell notebook will not keep running long enough to copy the data to a external USB drive, so we are trying to move the drive itself.
Any help would be excellent. BTW, I have tried 3 different recovery tools all without success 9a 4th is running right now).

At this time I can not give you a screen shot I have the disk back in the other machine to see what I can get off of it before that machine dies again.
But here is what is true about the disk
1) Currently working fine in a Win 7 Enterprise machine (where it began its life)
2) Currently reading data from it
3) No OS of any sort on this disk
4) No True-crypt anywhere on this disk
5) No raid anywhere on this dick of any sort
6) There are 2 partitions on this disk and both show up under disk manager in the proper locations
7) Once I move this working disk back to the system I am using for this message it will show as raw once again on the Win7 Pro 64bit machine, as it has done for the past 3 days.

I will post some screen shots when I can and thanks for your interest.

BTW: the 7 points above and having a known good HD is what makes me think it is a windows problem, and the fact that I have seen it on 3 other drives also. And all of these drives where good in their original home also.

The reason I can not do it now is I am not on that machine. The windows 7 enterprise machine is the one giving me trouble right now. That machine will die after 15 to 20 minutes (or the reason we pulled the 2nd and 3rd disks from it in the first place). So I am dealing with 2 separate and different issues, and that machine will die in 15 to 29 minutes with the 2nd disk in it or not in it. Here is a screen shot of one of the 2 disks that came from a Windows 7 Enterprise machine and placed in a windows 7 Pro machine. Like that other disk it was fine when in the original machine but shows as raw in the new machine.