2 TB drive went from NTFS to RAW

[KazeNoKoe23]

I had a pretty odd situation happen to me this morning. I had a 2 TB My Book Elite external HDD, which connected via USB. I noticed the USB cable that connected to the external was loose, so I powered off the computer and removed the cable from the drive, only to find the USB connector inside the drive had broken clean off. Knowing there was no way to fix that, I removed the HDD itself from the external enclosure, and plugged it into a spare SATA cable I had inside the tower. Computer booted fine, but now the drive is coming up as RAW, not NTFS. I know for a fact the drive itself is perfectly healthy, but for some reason going from an external USB connection to an internal SATA connection led to this problem. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to fix it? I refuse to believe the data is just GONE, because aside from going from external to internal, nothing has changed. I downloaded a program called TestDisk and left it to run, but I had to leave my house before it could finish. In the event it doesn't work, what are some additional steps I should take?

 

[IanDrexP]

Remove the Jumpers from the Hard Drive when using it with SATA

 

[dwarfer66]

My WD external 1TB DID not have jumpers, being a sata connection. After a power outage, my drive would only show as raw,, tried every data retrieval (paid & free), but lost all my movie & Tv show collection, in the end it became an internal newly formatted drive. So I now only use externals as internals.

 

[KazeNoKoe23]

My WD external 1TB DID not have jumpers, being a sata connection. After a power outage, my drive would only show as raw,, tried every data retrieval (paid & free), but lost all my movie & Tv show collection, in the end it became an internal newly formatted drive. So I now only use externals as internals.

Interesting situation, but I never had a power outage to speak of. Just the switch from a USB external to a SATA internal led to my drive going from NTFS to RAW.

 

[SIW2]

Try partition wizard. Home Edititon is free.

Run the partition recovery - quick scan on the whole drive. Tiack ALL partitions you want to keep

 

[SIW2]

Best Free Partition Manager Freeware and free partition magic for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows XP 32 bit & 64 bit. MiniTool Free Partition Manager Software Home Edition.

 

[KazeNoKoe23]

Partition Recovery was greyed out, although it was for every drive I clicked on, be it the RAW one or an NTFS one.

 

[gfarm]

I had once a similar problem which was luckily solved.

Partition d: on my laptop HDD after some system crash was seen only as a RAW partition under Win7. Oddly enough partition C: was still recognized as NTFS.
I removed HDD from my laptop and connected it via SATA to my PC. Still no success under Win7 x64.
Then I tried with Windows XP which I keep on a separate HDD, just in case... And miraculously the "Win7 RAW partition" was recognized as NTFS under Win XP! So I could easily recover all my files.
So if you have Win XP, give it a try! And let us know if you have succeeded.
Good luck!

 

[KazeNoKoe23]

I had once a similar problem which was luckily solved.

Partition d: on my laptop HDD after some system crash was seen only as a RAW partition under Win7. Oddly enough partition C: was still recognized as NTFS.
I removed HDD from my laptop and connected it via SATA to my PC. Still no success under Win7 x64.
Then I tried with Windows XP which I keep on a separate HDD, just in case... And miraculously the "Win7 RAW partition" was recognized as NTFS under Win XP! So I could easily recover all my files.
So if you have Win XP, give it a try! And let us know if you have succeeded.
Good luck!

I wish I had tried this earlier. Nothing else was working so I just formatted the disk. Everything else I read was telling me that recovery programs need to be able to read from some sort of filesystem and that they won't work with RAW drives, so I formatted with NTFS and then tried recovery. I'm using Easeus Data Recovery Wizard. It did manage to "recover" a lot of data, but it's not exactly intuitive. It says things like FILE001.SWF, and it would be like 5 GB or something like that. I definitely didn't have any 5 GB Shockwave files on the drive. Countless examples like that. If anyone can make sense of this, I'd appreciate it.