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General discussion

Retrieving data from HD which reports RAW file system

Feb 27, 2004 3:00AM PST

OK, I am making some progress. My Windows XP Home SP1 seems to be stable and working fine.

I am now trying to retrieve lost data on my 2nd internal HD (Maxtor 6Y120PO)which was NTFS and 120GB capacity. This drive originally held my backup data, MP3 files but was called into action when I could not start my C drive: I installed Windows XP Home on it, allowing me to get access to Drive C and fix it. When C was booting up, I deleted the Windows on D (probably leading to my current problems).

The file system reports RAW with 0 capacity. When I click on it, I am told it is not formatted. When I choose Properties, Populate I get:
Partition Style: MBR
Capacity: 32254 MB
with no unallocated space or reserved space.

ALSO: When I right click and choose Properties, Expand is at the top of the list (but grayed out). I can't see how to Expand, if it really is compressed.

Any ideas how to retrieve, repair or tools to try?

Discussion is locked

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Re:Retrieving data from HD which reports RAW file system
Feb 27, 2004 3:15AM PST

"raw" comes from unix, and it's not really a file system. About the only thing you can do with it is read sectors by sector number. Want sector #16363, then you get sector #16363. It's useful if you want to write your own database system, without being hampered by limitations of the unix filesystem.

http://www.computing.net/hardware/wwwboard/forum/20956.html might give a badly needed solution. You might find others by a google search for "file system" raw, as I did.

It might be interesting for the forum to know how and why you 'deleted the Windows' on that disk. Then other people can do to try better!

Hope this helps.


Kees

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Re:Re:Retrieving data from HD which reports RAW file system
Feb 27, 2004 5:35AM PST

Thanks for the lead. I was able to find a free utility to recover many of the lost files; how many, I don't know yet until the process is finished.

I deleted the Windows on the D-drive, thinking I didn't need a second OS taking up space. I am not sure if that is what precipitated the conversion of my disk from NTFS to RAW, but it happened. Reading other help requests on www.computing.net, it seems to be happening a lot (and under similar situations).