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Question

USB SATA IDE Adaptor - asking me to format hard drives

Aug 26, 2015 10:26AM PDT

I needed to access hard drives (2 of them) from my old computer so I bought a Bipra USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Adaptor. Had a few teething troubles detecting the drives but solved that. Only problem now both of them are saying I need to the format drives (does not contain a recognised file system). I definitely don't want to format as I'm trying to recover photos.

In Disk Management, it's saying the drives are RAW rather than NTFS like the other drives on my computer.

Not sure if matters but the old computer had a RAID array, hence the 2 hard drives.

What do I need to configure to avoid the "you need to format" and access the drives?

Let me know if any other info needed, relative IT novice so speak slowly

Discussion is locked

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Answer
In this case, all proper.
Aug 26, 2015 3:35PM PDT
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Answer
Steps with Linux
Aug 27, 2015 1:53AM PDT

Hi there.

When a drive shows up as RAW that means it somehow lost the partition that was there, which is why the message "You need to format the drive" shows too. You can recover that original partition by using Linux Live CD like R. Proffitt suggested, and since you're a novice Here are the steps I would suggest you to follow in order to do that:

1. Download and burn the ISO image of Linux to a CD or USB.
2. Once you do this, go in BIOS and change the boot order to the media you burned the Linux on.
3. Restart the computer and when it loads, try and mount the drives (or if Linux can read it, it will mount by itself).
4. See if you can access the data stored there and if you do - transfer it to another location.

Also, can you remember what type of RAID were you using? If it was RAID 1 then you need to access only one of the drives since they'll be mirrored and the content should be identical.

However, if you had RAID 0, which also requires 2 hard drives, you won't be able to get any of the data because it is split up across them. The idea if this array is that the data can be read or written to/from all the drives at once, hypothetically increasing the transfer rate by the multiple of the number of drives.. You never actually achieve that much of an increase, but it can be substantial. Though the actual worth of it isn't that great, as few things are bounded by the disk transfer rate, but rather by access times and processor power.

Hope this helps and let us know how it went.

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Answer
If RAID 0 you need to rebuild the array first
Sep 20, 2015 8:30PM PDT
FIRST OFF: It's not the adapter asking you to reformat. It's your computer because it doesn't see any file structure signatures on the drive.

SECONDLY:You need to know why the drives are having problems. RAW drives can be caused by bad sectors or failing/failed read/write heads.

Working on any of the drives (including running software or even keeping them running) without knowing what caused the failure is RISKY to say the least (if your data is important).

If this is a RAID 0 you need to virtually rebuild the array (risky without experience) before you can do anything about getting the data. Once you have access to the array storage container then you can probable run some software (risky) to recover your photos.

If this is NOT a RAID 0 and is a RAID 1 then you can connect one of the drives and try to run software on it to recover the photos.