Hi, Im having a 160Gb Seagate Hdd and a 400Gb Hitachi Hdd with 3 partitions each. I had Vista installed on the Seagate hdd while there was no OS on the other hdd. Something happened and my Seagate hdd stopped booting suddenly. So I was left without an OS. On trying to use the Vista Recovery CD, the Seagate Hdd was shown as one single partition and when I tried to open the partition, the recovery asked me if I would like to format the drive. I could not do that since theres a lot of valuable data on that drive. So I used Fedora Linux CD and emptied the contents of one of the 400gb hdd onto another partition to have an empty partition on that hdd and then I installed Vista on that hdd. So, I was left with the 400gb hdd with Vista and my old 160gb hdd which wasnt accessible no matter what I tried. It just shows as one drive which is actually 3 drives.. I used GetDataBack software on the new hdd to get my data from the old hdd and I noticed that the software actually managed to read my hard disk since it detected a lot of my files. I tried to recover them onto the safe hard disk but none of them work. Jpgs, avi, exe,....none of them open in their respectible softwares. I want to repair my Seagate hdd coz a lot of my software settings were saved in that hdd which would be lost now. Im still unsure of what really happened but I believe that there would be a work around for this. On doing hard disk tests using some softwares available on the net, Im pretty certain that the hard disk doesnt have any damaged or bad sectors. I tested that with different softwares to be sure abt it. Please help, people.
Whenever your hard drive with the OS gets converted to RAW for no apperent reason that's ussually a sign of system file corruption. That's usually cause by an abnormal shutdown. The good part is that on a NTFS partition, that is almost always fixable. I've encountered this problem more than once and I was alway able to get the "RAW" partition to boot again. All you need to do is run a chkdsk c: /f on all your partitions. That will usually fix the corrupted system files and get your "RAW" drive to become operational again. All your data is still there. Also you can do a scandisk "with the box to fix errors checked". You might need a "bartpe" cd to bootup the computer and run the chkdsk command. You can also remove the hard drive and try and hook it onto an external usb enclosure and run a scandisk from another computer. This is definitely a fixable problem. I've had good success with "raw" drives.
hi, thanks for taking your time off to reply. well, firstly, my 160gb hard disk is getting detected as 1 RAW drive of 127.99GB and 21.06GB of Unallocated space....which i believe is 128GB of my data while the 21gb is unused free space on that hard disk...that is what i saw in computer management > disk management. also, from what iv heard and read abt fdisk and chkdsk online is that they render unreadable drives literally useless. my pc wasnt showin me any display a few days back, so i tried restarting it a few times.my display card ws acting funny so i cleaned it n put it back n it started working, but i believe the boot of the hard disk got affected because of the restarting. im using Recover My Files right now and iv managed to retrieve my full music collection so Im very positive that the hard disk hasnt been affected physically nor are there any bad sectors since i checkd for them using a lot of tools including seatools.... what would have happened? and what should now be done? would the fdisk n chkdsk really work for my hdd? n whats with the unallocated space?? thanks everyone for taking time to read
When you have file corruption, it only affects several files, but those files will make the hard drive unreadable. That's why you are still able to recover your data even though it's corrupted. Doing a chkdsk is the same as doing a scandisk (which is a part of the windows tools). Most times when the computer is shutdown incorrectly, the next time you bootup, you get a bluescreen telling you windows was not shutdown properly and it needs to check hard drives for errors. That's "scandisk" in work. If it finds errors it'll ask you if you want them fixed. Sometimes if the files are too corrupted the computer won't boot, you have to go in manually and run a chkdsk. I always use a "bartpe" because it will boot from a cd and let you use the command line to access your hard drives. The only time that it can cause problems is if the partition has some other software installed that encryts the hard drive or keeps tracks of hard drive sectors (eazyfix/fdisr etc) that might change things so those programs won't work. If chkdsk or scandisk doesn't fix the problem, it won't render the drive unrecoverable. It will only try to fix a small number of files and will leave the rest of the data alone. The only thing that will damage a hard drive to where you can't restore anything is a "format" (and even then you can still recover data from it). I'm not sure about fdisk, I don't use that command to fix hard drives. Everytime I have used chkdsk c: /f it has always work for me. If I encounter a "raw" drive that is the first thing I do. Doing a chkdsk does take time, at least half an hour maybe longer.
