Read http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7588_102-0.html?threadID=354911&tag=forums06;forum-threads and we cover the usual titles, the usual move the drive from the enclosure to another and the usual.
Good luck,
Bob
So my external hard drive is failing and I'm scrambling to get the data off of it. It's a 1TB WD MyBook formatted NTFS. Some of the stuff is backed up but some of it is not. Yes, I am an idiot. Now that we've gotten that out of the way...
This external drive was attached to a WinXP box and it started having issues actually seeing the drive (using either the command line or explorer). Whenever I clicked on it, XP would give me an error saying it couldn't find the drive. So I hooked it up to my Win7 machine and it could see the drive (explorer only), just not see anything actually on the drive. Trying to see if I could at least fix the drive somewhat, I dropped to the command line and ran
chkdsk /f <drive>
It made it through the entire drive and afterwards, I was able to see a directory/file listing of the entire drive (in both explorer and the command line). Chkdsk did find a lot of problems and given that I was able to see everything, presumably it fixed them. From what I recall, the errors were something about indexes and files being in the wrong place. There were other, different errors but I don't recall them off hand. But there was no indication that anything it ran across was unfixable.
So I started copying (well, moving really) files from the external to another drive I just bought. Several of the directories migrated over fine. However, a great many of the files did not move over because explorer kept giving me an error saying it could not find the file. Hundreds of file. It knew the file name and it knew in what directory the file was located but it couldn't find the actual file. Odd.
So thinking that another round of chkdsk might help out, I dropped to the command line and tried running it again. However, this time it told me that the drive type was RAW (and not NTFS, like it should be) and that it couldn't work on RAW drives. Ok, I guess that explains why it wasn't able to find the actual files. So I'm wondering, am I totally screwed here or is there a way to continue my recovery efforts? Is there a way to get it from RAW to NTFS? Is there a way to get my files off RAW drives?
Any help and/or advice would be greatly appreciated!
thnx,
Christoph

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