Hard drive question

Is your data important? Once you format the drive and change it to NTFS it will make recovering your files will be much more difficult and your chances of recovering files will decrease as you move more data or add more data. Your first option sounds good on paper but you need to remember that once it gets formatted you WILL lose partial data. It could be very severe or very minimal, no way to know. Second when you recover data and copy it over, it will not be written in the same location. You will AUTOMATICALLY lose more access to data as you write more data into the affected drive. Every time you write more data you could write data in sections that don't just affect one file but possible a large amount of data. Option one and two are almost identical, dangerous, and bad for your data. Go out and buy a HDD, these days you can buy 4TB HDD for a fraction of what I paid for them just 2 years ago.. A 1TB drive is insanely cheap today Amazon.com: WD Blue 1TB Desktop 3.5 Inch SATA 6Gb/s 7200rpm Internal Hard Drive: Computers Accessories
(Did you need your drive to be external? Amazon.com: Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2 TB Portable Hard Drive, Black (Old Model): Computers Accessories )

Besides having more drives is always nice It's not a consumable it's something that will likely last you 5+ years.

chris1neji said:

Is your data important? Once you format the drive and change it to NTFS it will make recovering your files will be much more difficult and your chances of recovering files will decrease as you move more data or add more data. Your first option sounds good on paper but you need to remember that once it gets formatted you WILL lose partial data. It could be very severe or very minimal, no way to know. Second when you recover data and copy it over, it will not be written in the same location. You will AUTOMATICALLY lose more access to data as you write more data into the affected drive. Every time you write more data you could write data in sections that don't just affect one file but possible a large amount of data. Option one and two are almost identical, dangerous, and bad for your data. Go out and buy a HDD, these days you can buy 4TB HDD for a fraction of what I paid for them just 2 years ago.. A 1TB drive is insanely cheap today Amazon.com: WD Blue 1TB Desktop 3.5 Inch SATA 6Gb/s 7200rpm Internal Hard Drive: Computers Accessories
(Did you need your drive to be external? Amazon.com: Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2 TB Portable Hard Drive, Black (Old Model): Computers Accessories )

Besides having more drives is always nice It's not a consumable it's something that will likely last you 5+ years.

Yeah I was thinking that would probably be the case. I'm definitely going to get a 1TB external when the time is right. thanks for the links! I have a 100 gb external and a couple 50 gb usb sticks to hold me over for now.

The files on this drive are irreplaceable so i definitely want to go the route where i can recover most, if not all the files. nothing has been written onto the drive since this happened.

Night Hawk said:

There are a few other options open. A quick web search will reveal some freeware as well as free to try trial versions of any number of data recovery programs. Besides Easeus for example you also see GetDataBack for NTFS or Fat as two separate trial wares. Data Recovery Software Products - Runtime Software Products as well as Recuva, PC Inspector, PhotoRec, etc.

What happens to a drive when Windows sees it as "Raw" is that some type of corruption with the file system on the drive has been seen where sometimes the mbr or partition information can be rewritten from a command prompt. When booted live with the 10 media you would use the command prompt option to enter the fixmbr command while any other drive is unplugged to avoid any changes elsewhere. The bootrec command is more common for the newer versions however. http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixthe...or-windows.htm

With one troublesome drive now 5yrs. old here that had been in the main build as the matching twin for a pair of 1tb drives set up for storage and back up purposes only one became inaccessible or took a long, long time ago in a place far, far away just to get on it to view the contents! Yet when stuffing it in an external usb enclosure it suddenly came to life again and now acts a temp storage drive in order to transfer or rescue files now only seeing light use.

While a 1tb usb flash drive is still way higher then Mt Everest in price tags I grabbed a pair of 128gbs cheap one day at Amazon. As far as data recovery you are never actually writing more to any drive but reading what is on it as things are recovered. Then you have the option of bringing a spare fresh drive along with you to a shop that does specialty work like data recovery for a fee. That's where the shop keep is equipped to recover what can be recovered from any drive.

Now for the problem drive here I had seen temporary relief by simply swapping out the data cable for a fresh replacement where then the drive was easily accessible. Dirt and debris can build up and put pressure on the plugs at times causing a coninuity type issue where a drive can appear to be bad. The move into the external enclosure suddenly making the drive easy to access could point to a possible clugged up or bad Sata port on the board itself.

Thanks for all the helpful info! I will start looking into it after i make this post. If it helps, the mistake i made was i accessed 'diskpart' in the command prompt in an attempt to change my drive letter because it was changed to K: for whatever reason when i installed win10. the prompt said it was successfully changed. and that's when the drive became unreadable. I have reinstalled my os twice since then because of a separate problem.

I do have 2 160 GB HDs but they're meant for internal use and i don't think my power supply has enough HD connectors to fit both of them and my 1TB HD

I had this same issue and almost lost all my photos and movies due to a SNAFU with my backup and primary at the same time. I changed a drive letter on my external Seagate 2TB, and hot unplugged / re-plugged it from a flaky USB hub. One of those things caused the disk file system to go RAW instead of NTFS. The recovery took about 5 minutes (after the near heart attack), and all my files were there and uncorrupted. I just followed the instructions here:
From NTFS to RAW and back

- change the drive letter (this step may not have even been necessary)
- run chkdsk /f on the drive letter

I ran across this post and was despondent, so figured I'd add this in case someone else has my same issue and can use the easy fix.
Good luck!