Anybody have any experience with this?
Windows 10 PC
Sounds like the disk is corrupted. Windows 10 doesn’t support raw partitions.
Try connecting the disk to a PC using a USB adapter and running chkdsk /f /r x: (where X is your drive letter)
What size is the drive?
1 tb and 2 tb are you saying plug it into a win 7 pc and run that command.
Chkdsk doesnt work on the raw drive on the win 10 PC
Is there data on the partition you need to recover? I’m not saying I can get the boot sector into a usable state, but data recovery is something I’ve worked with quite frequently and have plenty of experience with.
In the end, you’re probably going to want to get a new disk, and reinstall, but I can take a look at the disk if there’s something on it you need recovered. I don’t make guarantees, promises, or hold liability, but I can try to help.
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Thanks man, I’m running a 3rd party recovery software now to see if I can get what i need off of it. If that doesn’t work, i’ll connect with you to see if you can work some magic.
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I’ve twice had great success with soothing a cranky drive by freezing it. Once it saved my butt to the point where I cried. (I’m a girl. It’s allowed.)
Sometimes running it upside down helps.
Good luck.
No problem. The one thing I caution against is making sure that absolutely nothing is writing to the drive you are trying to recover from. It can really make a bad day worse.
Yeah, software is runninng on C and the drive is an external that i hooked up directly to sata ports, thats the only way i could get it to initialize, looks like the extension boards were bad as well.
Yes sir. 
I have found that CHKDSK often makes things much worse if there is file system corruption as it just deletes records it does not know how to deal with. I usually image the drive with DiskExplorer and run GetDataBack against the image to recover files. I used to do some data recovery work at the computer store I worked at years ago before getting into IT. The freezer trick is usually a last ditch attempt to get the drive running just long enough to recover the most critical files before it dropped dead once it warmed up.
One thing I need to order is a replacement read only drive adapter so nothing can attempt to write to the drive being recovered. Sometimes if there is a filesystem that the recovery host PC can see the antivirus will kick in and start scanning the drive and encounter a error and the whole drive fails or becomes unavailable while it chokes on the errors.
With the unexpected failure of drives, theft, or ransomware it is a good idea to plan for data loss and have good backups.
- Always keep backups of all important data. I usually write a small script to mirror folders using robocopy or rsync. I also use Corbian Backup 11 to create zip files archives of full or incremental backups for certain systems.
- Test recovering from your backups occasionally to make sure they are actually working and usable when you need them. Often people find that their backups were not working or usable when they need them the most. This is one of the most common issues I have seen with people who think they had backups. When needed they found out that something was wrong and it was not getting the data they needed the most.
- Keep more than one copy of the backups. If possible keep a set offsite in a secure location. Fire or theft can easily cause you to loose both your computer and the backup if kept in the same site.
- Look into private cloud based storage to store a backup of the most critical files, photos, etc. If you have anything sensitive like financial or medial information you may want to encrypt those files but don’t loose the encryption key.
- The bigger the drive or storage array the more it is going to hurt when you have a failure. Data recovery is a very time consuming process and the bigger the drives the longer it takes and you need enough room to image the drive and then recover the files. Usually 2-3x the original drive size. Cheap consumer grade network attached storage boxes often are an issue when they fail. Being built with a custom controller and non-off the shelf parts they are not easy to recover from. Also usually the filesystem on them is EXT2 or something other than FAT32 or NTFS. Recovering from a damaged file system in Linux is possible, but it makes things much harder when things go wrong.
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Hello All,
M3 Data recovery software worked flawlessly.
It was 75.00 but it recovered all of the files that i needed, it collected the data overnight, displayed the same folder structure, and file names, and it even pulled up every file that was deleted off of the drive.
It gives you the option to restore those files as well.
It also has the option to attempt to convert the RAW drive to NTFS or FAT, once the files are pulled off of the drive, to make it usable again.
Highly recommended…
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Be wary of continuing to use that drive though. This could indicate physical damage. So glad you were able to recover your data!
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You are correct, it is clicking and from the owner has been dropped. So probably trash them both.
They should toss it in a drawer in case they need to pull something off it again. Hold on to it for a bit before tossing it and when you do toss it, disassemble it and pull those super magnets out of it.
Those HDs have magnets in them that make your fridge magnets look puny.
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