RAW File System

[Pushead2]

Okay CP IT gurus, I'm in need of some help.

So back when I was a touring musician, my band had purchased a Lacie d2 - Triple Interface and it was used with Windows XP and OSX Tiger. Had all our photos, Pro Tools files, live videos from shows - the whole nine yards.

Going through some boxes in the garage, I found the hard drive, but it's not being recognized by Windows 7, 10 or OS Sierra. There are no drivers online available for it, the LaCie Update Tool for Mac doesn't work but I was able to assign it a letter on my Windows 7 laptop and now it's listed as a RAW file type.

I downloaded EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard to see if there were files on there and everything is still there, but it's $80 for a one-time licence.

Is there any other way I could extract the data from the hard drive? Perhaps find an old XP PC on craigslist? A trick to get my laptop to recognize the hard drive? Or am I stuck paying the $80 for the files?

[loochy]

raw means that it's not formatted

it must be formatted for windows to see the data structure

so, without a special data recovery program, you probably won't be able to do anything

it looks like you're stuck with trying EaseUS

1) The EaseUS Recovery Wizard has a free trial. Did you download and try it yet?

2) The software is on sale right now for $69

[loochy]

you probably already found this, but:

http://www.easeus.com/resource/raw-f...em-to-ntfs.htm

Try the free trial man

[ChiliConCarnage]

I googled and found this

Hard Drive Has changed to RAW format
by framplot / January 17, 2010 10:04 AM PST
In reply to: Hard Drive changed to RAW format

Three days ago my music and photo hard drive (with a total of 950,000 files on it), suddenly changed to the RAW format.

I found a link to the Easeus Data Recovery programme. (It's a free download to early February 2010)

Don't touch it with a bargepole. It took more than ten hours to "examine" my drive, at which point it told me there were more than 90 partitions on the drive and I could only select 4 files a time for restoration. (Confirmed by Easeus when I emailed them !!)

Go for FILE SCAVENGER - it's simply fantastic. It took 41 seconds to examine my drive, all file names were maintained, as was the full file structure, and in just over one hour it has restored ALL the data.

I wasn't too bothered about the photo's but losing the music would have gutted me. I'm pleased to say I'm listening to some tracks at the moment.

I'm not a "geek" by any stretch of the imagination so I don't have a clue how File Scavenger does such an amazing job. All I can say is that I can certainly vouch for the fact that it works !!

Oh yes, I'm using Win 7, and File Scavenger works perfectly.

Could be an ad by this company disguised as a review but you might look at File Scavenger. I've used the tool RECUVA before for deleted files. Might be another option to try. It's free

[Fish]

Do you know how the drive was originally partitioned? What does OS X Disk Utility say? I'd attempt recovery via OS X instead of Windows 7. Win7 cannot read OS X partitions, but OS X can read Win7 NTFS/FAT32 partitions. I'd launch Disk Utility in OS X, and see what it says regarding the drive. If it can see the partitions, you may be able to recover data with an app like DiskWarrior.

[hometeam]

if its raw you need to recover the data, sticking it in another PC wont work as it will be raw there as well. It may just boot files damaged, but its really easier if you just go ahead and get the data off before you start writing files to it.

Try Recuva out, its made by the same people who do CCleaner.

[Baby Lee]

Originally Posted by hometeam

if its raw you need to recover the data, sticking it in another PC wont work as it will be raw there as well. It may just boot files damaged, but its really easier if you just go ahead and get the data off before you start writing files to it.

Try Recuva out, its made by the same people who do CCleaner.

Not necessarily true. Not saying it's the case here, but I had a problem with the Win10 anniversary update seeing my external drives as RAW. I ended up having to manually hold-off updates for a few months until they fixed it.

But Win10 prior to Anniversary Update, as well as previous versions of Windows would still see those drives properly, so long as you DIDN'T attempt recovery or otherwise muck around with it in an OS environment that didn't recognize it.

[Pushead2]

Originally Posted by Fish

Do you know how the drive was originally partitioned? What does OS X Disk Utility say? I'd attempt recovery via OS X instead of Windows 7. Win7 cannot read OS X partitions, but OS X can read Win7 NTFS/FAT32 partitions. I'd launch Disk Utility in OS X, and see what it says regarding the drive. If it can see the partitions, you may be able to recover data with an app like DiskWarrior.

Let me double check but I think it was same thing as Windows.

I could see there was a hard drive plugged in, but I can't access the drive.

Would Disk Warrior allow me to do that?

[Pushead2]

Originally Posted by loochy

raw means that it's not formatted

it must be formatted for windows to see the data structure

so, without a special data recovery program, you probably won't be able to do anything

it looks like you're stuck with trying EaseUS

1) The EaseUS Recovery Wizard has a free trial. Did you download and try it yet?

2) The software is on sale right now for $69

I downloaded it and that's how I knew that all of my files were still there, but I didn't buy it yet.

[Pushead2]

Originally Posted by ChiliConCarnage

I googled and found this



Could be an ad by this company disguised as a review but you might look at File Scavenger. I've used the tool RECUVA before for deleted files. Might be another option to try. It's free

Tried RECUVA and it didn't recognize the hard drive because it wasn't formatted.

[loochy]

Originally Posted by Pushead2

Tried RECUVA and it didn't recognize the hard drive because it wasn't formatted.

What about his File Scavenger?

[Baby Lee]

Here's a thread from when this happened to me due to power outage [separate incident from the Win10 update issue. I ended up using EaseUs, but it wasn't a perfect solution.

http://www.chiefsplanet.com/BB/showt...light=raw+ntfs

This is pretty much the best advice, at least for the moment. Assuming you don't have an ultra-urgent need for the space or the data

Originally Posted by Mr. Laz

Raw file system just means that it is a file system that is not recognized by Windows. Therefore all the available file system drivers are unable to mount the file system as a drive. Since Windows sees no file system in the partition, it prompts you to format it in order to create a file system on it. Do not format it and or write anything to it.

Repair the partition table and boot sector

In most cases, the data is sitting there but inaccessible. Best bet is to find a way to do a complete recovery by finding a OS or program that recognizes the boot sector and partition table before trying half-measures. So long as you don't read or write anything, the possibility remains of finding something that will read the data correctly.

Here's the thread from the AU episode. This time I didn't touch the drives, and MS eventually fixed the issue on their end.

http://chiefsplanet.com/BB/showthrea...versary+update

[Fish]

Originally Posted by Pushead2

Let me double check but I think it was same thing as Windows.

I could see there was a hard drive plugged in, but I can't access the drive.

Would Disk Warrior allow me to do that?

Again, it depends on how the drive was partitioned. If it contains an HFS Apple partition, then that partition will not be recognized within Windows, even if it's working fine. Recuva and File Scavenger are Windows only apps and cannot read HFS partitions. So if the drive is HFS, those apps won't be able to even read the drive. You mentioned in the OP that it was used for Pro Tools, which makes me think it's likely formatted as HFS, or at least has one HFS partition. I just wanted to make sure you weren't trying Windows only tools on an Apple formatted drive. If it is HFS, then yes, Diskwarrior is your best bet for data recovery.

[ChiliConCarnage]

Originally Posted by Pushead2

Tried RECUVA and it didn't recognize the hard drive because it wasn't formatted.

Do you know the partition layout? Was the drive just one large partition?
Linux has tools that allow you to simply delete and recreate a partition. I do it from time to time when I've expanded a disk and want to resize the partition and then the filesystem.

I don't know of how you can do that in Windows. Searching seemed to come back with testdisk. Never really heard of it. There are some other suggestions too

https://superuser.com/questions/1337...osing-the-data

I've never used it but I know some people boot to gparted when they need to resize a root drive that someone didn't create with LVM. It's a graphical interface so thats nicer than command line

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

I'd just try to get to the data and copy it somewhere else. Linux doesn't require a partition to access a filesystem so hopefully you can just copy your data off w/ the below instructions under Attempting Data rescue

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/displ...me=help-manual

Realized these were all sourceforge. For a while they served up malware but I believe they've gone back legit. Here is a link right to gparted themselves it appears
http://gparted.org/livecd.php

[Pushead2]

Originally Posted by Fish

Again, it depends on how the drive was partitioned. If it contains an HFS Apple partition, then that partition will not be recognized within Windows, even if it's working fine. Recuva and File Scavenger are Windows only apps and cannot read HFS partitions. So if the drive is HFS, those apps won't be able to even read the drive. You mentioned in the OP that it was used for Pro Tools, which makes me think it's likely formatted as HFS, or at least has one HFS partition. I just wanted to make sure you weren't trying Windows only tools on an Apple formatted drive. If it is HFS, then yes, Diskwarrior is your best bet for data recovery.

It was definitely partitioned for a MAC because when we recorded our second release, it was used to store all the files from Pro Tools (as we both state).

I'll try today to check it out when I get a chance.

Is DiskWarrior free software?