Need to recover data from HDD that's suddenly unrecognized by Win7

I need help recovering data from a drive that is showing up as RAW in Disk Management. I have 2 1TB WD drives that I was using in a hardware RAID0 array with a 1TB SSD as my OS drive. I've since recommissioned those drives as individual 1TB drives, one for storage and one for backup (my motherboard wouldn't allow RAID if I wanted to enable AHCI. It's one or the other).

Flash forward to today, I backed up my SSD to one of these drives and reinstalled Windows 7 Pro x64, but when everything was installed the drive I used as a backup wasn't showing in Explorer. When I open up Disk Management, it detects the drive as a RAW 1.82TB drive (it's only 1TB) and it says it needs to be initialized. The other HDD shows up perfectly as a 1TB NTFS volume and can be read with no issues.

I'm at a loss. I've tried Recuva, GetBackData and ZAR. They all say the file format is unrecognizable and ZAR reads nothing but bad sectors on it.

Should I tell it to initialize and perform data recovery after or will that completely destroy all chances at recovering the data?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Update: I went into my motherboard's RAID utility and saw that it had somehow reverted to a RAID volume. I reset the drive so it is no longer recognized as a RAID volume and ZAR X is now able to read the sectors. Hopefully that will mean I can recover the data...

Hi mate.

I sure hope you can access and manipulate the data on your drive!

If it continues to show up as RAW, then I can recommend to give Linux Live CD a chance and see if you can mount the HDD there. To do that just download/burn the ISO image to a CD or USB and change the boot order in BIOS to the media you burned the Linux on. Once it loads, you could try and mount the drive (or if Linux can read it, it will mount by itself) and see if you can transfer the files from there.

Let me know how it went and if you need any further help.

Thanks for the reply. I was successful in getting Zero Assumption Recovery to see the files, but it'll only recover four folders unless I pay for a license and unfortunately funds are rather tight at the moment...

I tried downloading a few distros of Linux Live CD but can't get any of them to boot from my system. I can get my system to attempt to boot from the disc but it comes up with a bunch of errors then freezes on a black screen. I'm not very Linux savvy so I'm not exactly sure how to get one to work.

skorpien said:

Thanks for the reply. I was successful in getting Zero Assumption Recovery to see the files, but it'll only recover four folders unless I pay for a license and unfortunately funds are rather tight at the moment...

I tried downloading a few distros of Linux Live CD but can't get any of them to boot from my system. I can get my system to attempt to boot from the disc but it comes up with a bunch of errors then freezes on a black screen. I'm not very Linux savvy so I'm not exactly sure how to get one to work.

Click to expand...

Be sure to check the md5 hash after you get your image. Im not terrible well versed in these things either but I had similar issues and the md5 showed my download was corrupt. That would be the first thing to check. The most user friendly distro is supposedly Linux Mint, perhaps that one may take some of the guess work out?

As far as your original issue, I can reccomend a recovery program, but the free version limits to 1gb (if it would even work).

knoober said:

Be sure to check the md5 hash after you get your image. Im not terrible well versed in these things either but I had similar issues and the md5 showed my download was corrupt. That would be the first thing to check. The most user friendly distro is supposedly Linux Mint, perhaps that one may take some of the guess work out?

As far as your original issue, I can reccomend a recovery program, but the free version limits to 1gb (if it would even work).

Click to expand...

Thanks, knoober. I'll give Linux Mint a try.

I was able to find a completely free recovery software, TestDisk. There's no limitation in place thankfully, but no GUI either though it was fairly easy to figure out. Times like these I appreciate having grown up with DOS and knowing how to use command prompt

I'm going to give Linux Mint a go too, to make sure everything was recovered properly. I have a feeling I'll be able to mount the disk if I can get it running.

Was about to recommend testdisk, glad you found it, it's worked very well for me in the past.

Thanks Janus, I'm glad I found it too. I was giving up hope for a while, every program I tried failed to mention the trial limitations until AFTER I spent hours scanning my drive with it.

It seems like the Linux way is a no go for me. I'm having hardware issues with my motherboard that's preventing me from booting any Linux distro; some ATA error I believe. From what I've found, some were able to solve it by switching which SATA ports were used on their motherboard.

I really don't feel up to troubleshooting that at the moment; my case is way too big, cramped and heavy for me to move and troubleshoot.