Hi all,

Typical problem here. My hard drive although being recognized by my computer, won't let me access any files and says it needs to be formatted.

Any recovery tools or ideas you recommend?

I'm guessing it's missing a partition or something. It froze and acted weird when I tried to transfer a huge amount of files and that's when this problem started.

I don't wanna lose all my music!!!!!!!!!!!

You're on windows? Have you done a "chkdsk /R"? This is a secondary drive right?

This helped me with similar HDD issues: http://www.piriform.com/recuva

What's a chkdsk? Yeah secondary external drive.

Warpped I can't see any programs there that help with Hard drives? That's for deleted files? Will download it and take a look once I finish work though.

Just a windows command that will scan the drive and attempt to repair bad sectors and things. Let's say your drive is letter E:

start > run > "cmd" > then type "chkdsk E: /R"

You can type "chkdsk /?" to see a list of options. It might take a while to run, especially if there are bad sectors on it. But it'll tell you about any problems. It's worth a shot just to see what happens, but be aware it could take an hour or two to run, depending on what's wrong with the disk. If you leave off "/R" it won't attempt to repair them, just dump a list of what's wrong.


I'll google a bit today at work to see if there's any programs I can find. But as far as that Recuva program warped linked to, you should be able to use that to find files on the disk and move them off onto a good drive. Haven't used it so I don't know, and it might only work on things you actually deleted (not just things that are not recoverable because of a bad disk). It's free and Piriform makes OK programs (I use CCleaner all the time, it works well for what it does) so no need to worry about that.

Awesome I'll definitely give that a try when I get home. Thanks a lot!!!

I hear this tool is pretty good so I'll try this too: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

Yeah you can use it to recover files from HDD's in cases like these usually. You just have to make sure you run it in advanced mode (that is, do not run through the wizard) and change the settings so that it collects non-deleted files. Then select the drive you want to scan for files. Its been a few months so my memory is a bit hazy.

Hey GR it says the selection is raw so chklist won't run.

It was probably formatted as NTFS at some point, right? Do you know? Is it an external drive?

Here's an interesting page: http://www.z-a-recovery.com/art-raw-filesystem.htm

Sometimes, the volume fails in such a way that it becomes RAW.

This page implies data is recoverable. The "raw" bit's a good hint, and you'll probably have to use some software to fix it, but you can search for like, "hard drive raw recovery" or something.

Maybe try this software: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk


This one costs money but if TestDisk doesn't work and you're desperate: http://www.z-a-recovery.com/register.htm



If the hard drive isn't dying, and something just got corrupted somehow (any odd shutdowns? power failure? any crashes or anything?), you'll have to re-format the disk to use it again, but you will need to recover your files first because the format will delete them all. You can still recover them but it will be much more difficult and possibly expensive, so try to recover the data before you format it.


But if the drive is dying, and believe me once drives start to die all kinds of weird things start to happen (how old is it btw? less than a year? couple years old?), but if it's actually dying then I wouldn't recommend formatting and using it again, since it's likely to corrupt itself again and it's always bound to be unrecoverable at some point.

Thank you for all the replies. I'm going to try use test disk after I get back from going away this weekend to repair the partition, it does a scan which takes around 2-3 hours so after that I'll see what my next move is. Will probably try recovering the files otherwise with a file recovery program if I can find a free one. 

So I've been mucking around with this for the past few days and it's really complex. Might have to try copy the files off and reformat.

Here's some screenies

So I'd have to change my entire operating system? Ubuntu is a replacement for windows right