External harddisk - No access in Windows 10

Hi,

I have this WD 3707a external HDD that I use as a third backup for my Synology NAS. In the NAS I use a feature called Hyper Backup to back up pictures to the WD HDD.

Hyper Backup and the NAS can easily read the contents of the NAS, however when plugging the HDD into a Windows 10 PC, it is reported to be not accessible...



The text in the image say:

Location not available

F:\ is not available

The file or folder is damaged and cannot be read

Can this be fixed somehow?

Thank you

Caledon Ken said:

What file system is your Synology NAS using and is it setting any kind of protection status?

It uses NTFS and there is no protection on these backups. The strange thing is that I had three external disks where two of them was not able to be read in Windows. They were perfectly fine when opened via the NAS.

After formatting one of the two broken disks it works fine in Windows 10. The reason I do not want to format the last drive as well is because it contains more backup versions...

I'm sorry that I mislead you... The filesystem on the affected HDD is RAW, not NTFS... I have three external disks connected to the NAS from time to time, and the other two are NTFS. This last one not working is RAW... I assume that is the issue then? I do not know how that happened... I am sure I formatted it to NTFS, but apparently, I have not...

A drive that is RAW is being interpreted as RAW. It does not mean the drive is RAW.
For example you could move a windows drive from one computer to the secondary bay of another computer.
The second computer could read it as a RAW drive but it still has all of the files intact.

There is a boot error: inaccessible boot drive
When the drive is viewed in diskpart it will typically display the drive as RAW.
There are troubleshooting steps to fix the RAW interpretation so that the files can be read.

"Hyper Backup and the NAS can easily read the contents of the NAS",

If that is the case, can you not copy the files to another HDD and then format the drive as you did in the case of other two HDDs? ( Or am I naive and that is why I skipped this thread? )

As long as you connect the drive to a computer that can read the files the files can be copied(Windows has to be able to read the files).

See these links: (These are for information purposes only)
How to repair RAW external hard disk and recover data from RAW external hard disk?
Fix Raw External Hard Drive and Recover Files - EaseUS
UPDATED How To Fix: External Disk Drive Suddenly Became RAW Unknown Kadath
How Do I Do SD Card RAW Recovery Effectively

Hi there

probably the easiest solution is for the NAS to copy relevant files to another device - then you can re-format / repair the other HDD.

You could also possibly try booting a live Linux distro and see if it can read the files -- if so you can then copy them to another device in case your NAS can't do it.

Cheers
jimbo