Windows 7 Installed W7 on 1 hard drive - 2nd harddrive has lost data and now RAW format?

[mfx]

Hi

Have i7 with Hardisks.

Disk 1 has Windows 7 installed successfully. The other 3 disks are data disks.

2 of the 3 data disks are fine but 1 has somehow messed up.

The problem is the data disk which is/was 200gb seems to have converted itself to a RAW disk in data manager and in the desktop array it says corrupt needs formatting.

I have done nothing that I am aware of except prior to activating W7 I backed up to another spare disk, external...only thing that has changed.

Rebooted the machine, recovered the backup W7 installation and activated but none of this seemed to or should have affected the disk that is now RAW data in computer disk management.

The other point is the drive is showing as 94gb RAW data. I have activated it in in computer management with the hope of activating allow access to the data, but I have not formatted it.

Can anyone help please as I need to get the data back?
Can anyone help explain why the drive formerly NTFS has mysteriously converted to RAW format?
Anyone had any experience or ideas what needs ot be done and to avoid this in the future.

Really appreciate any help.

Many many thanks in advance

M

 

[mfx]

Problem Solved

Sorted.

I removed the Hard Drive from the Windows7 rig.

Mounted it in my XP rig and left unactivated/unformatted.

Use a program called R-Studio and recovered every single file 100%. Took about 60 hours to recover the lost 90Gbs of data and 45 mins to copy to a spare hardfrive....BRAVO.

Save a lot of heartache, hassle and by the comments a big expense. R-Studio recovery worth every penny.

It's worth noting that any program that I installed in the Windows7 rig failed to identify the drive or failed to identify any files...lesson learnt I think!

Good ol XP Reliable what can I say, I love Windows7 but even for simple network sharing it seems to be a pain in the bum to network share with an XP mavhine (unrelated to lost data).

Anyway thanks for the advice and hope my response helps anyone else in the same situation.

Thanks

 

[reghakr]

WOW, I never thought you get that data back due to the RAW disk.

I am definitely going to check out R-Studio.

Thanks for posting back with the solution.

 

[tblount]

Hi

Have i7 with Hardisks.

Disk 1 has Windows 7 installed successfully. The other 3 disks are data disks.

2 of the 3 data disks are fine but 1 has somehow messed up.

The problem is the data disk which is/was 200gb seems to have converted itself to a RAW disk in data manager and in the desktop array it says corrupt needs formatting.

I have done nothing that I am aware of except prior to activating W7 I backed up to another spare disk, external...only thing that has changed.

Rebooted the machine, recovered the backup W7 installation and activated but none of this seemed to or should have affected the disk that is now RAW data in computer disk management.

The other point is the drive is showing as 94gb RAW data. I have activated it in in computer management with the hope of activating allow access to the data, but I have not formatted it.

Can anyone help please as I need to get the data back?
Can anyone help explain why the drive formerly NTFS has mysteriously converted to RAW format?
Anyone had any experience or ideas what needs ot be done and to avoid this in the future.

Really appreciate any help.

Many many thanks in advance

M

Hopefully the tool mentioned will gain your data back.

I have tried and tried several times, with geat effort and detail to explain how this very problem happens and how to prevent it 100%.

Here is the thread:

http://windows7forums.com/windows-7-support/25352-want-install-windows-7-second-drive-how.html

Here are the highlights:

You'll never regret it if you simply unplug your Vista drive.. reboot then there will be no choice but for it to go on the second drive. I've done at least 6 or 8 installs, testing various setups and install methods and I'm pretty experienced but I STILL unplug my main drive so there is 0 chance of accidentally messin up the wrong drive and losing my data.
......

If you are "pretty experienced", I wonder why you would go on such a difficult route?

That's a fair question although it kind of implies that I'm less than "pretty experienced."

So, I'll explain. Your driver priority is set - FIRST - by the hardware order... THEN the bios menu allows that setting to be reassigned. This means that when you are normally running windows it appears as the C: drive... the first drive and D: is your backup drive. But it's not necessarily in that order..it may or may not be - it's just chance.

.... when you boot to dvd and load the install disk your drive options are not ALWAYS in the order you are familiar with. C: is no longer you OS D: is now your os drive... so go ahead and format or remove partitions on your D: drive and play roulette.

...or simply unplug your OS drive and eliminate any possiblity of error 100%