Drive just went RAW

[RobbieH]

One of my drives suddenly switched to RAW and I cannot "see" any of the data. Scanner has been running on this box for years, and it has never said there was any problem with the drive. I had to do an update today, which required a reboot, and upon reboot the drive is RAW. Of course I can't run CHKDSK on a RAW drive... and Scanner still says the drive is good?!?!  So, I googled around on the internet to hopefully find an easy solution (sort of like we used to do on FAT drives where we would recreate the MBR) but I could not find any good solutions. Can someone please point me in the right direction?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

First, I'm sorry to hear about this, as it is never a pleasant experience.

Sometimes running CHKDSK will work on a RAW drive, but sometimes not. It really depends on how bad the damage is. 

Data recovery is probably the best option here.  TestDisk and PhotoRec are good, free solutions.  TestDisk may be able to fix the partitions issue, actually. 

 

As for why StableBit Scanner shows the drive is a good, is that aside from the partition information being corrupted, the drive is healthy. 
While these sound like conflicting ideas, it can happen. 

Namely, a disk can turn "RAW" if a write to the partition table is interrupted.  Power loss, BSODs, or spontaneous disconnects (which are common on USB) can cause this to occur.  And if it's happening frequently, the odds of this happening increase significantly. 

[RobbieH]

No power failures, UPS in place, no disconnects, no crashes. It was working until I did a reboot, which should be a normal shutdown.

I pulled the drive and plugged it into my dock, and my dock went POP and smoke came out. Have a new dock on the way... it just wasn't a good day yesterday. 

Thank you for those tools, I could not find anything on the internet other than EaseUS, and they appear to be Chinese which makes me a little scared to send my credit card number to, and they have conflicting info on their pricing - I won't go into that here. 

Dock should be here tomorrow. Once I get everything back to normal, I may ask some questions about how to make sure I have Stablebit running correctly. I noticed it said something along the lines of "everything was oK when last tested on xx/xx/2017 which leads me to believe something wasn't set up right.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Ouch, I'm sorry to hear that!

And you're very welcome!  As for other tools, I highly recommend checking out http://alternativeto.net/. Not because they have software (they don't), but it's an absolutely fantastic place to find software!  No affiliation, also, just a user.

As EaseUS, yeah, chinese company, from the looks of it. But as for shady? Not so much. But with everything on the internet, use a credit card, paypal or the like to make purchases. That way, you have a buffer and recourse if/when something goes wrong (even with reputable companies, like us!)!
As for conflicting prices, that's ... odd.  But Recuva may be a better solution (we've had a number of users report good experience with it).

As for StableBit Scanner, if the last check was on 2017, then you may not have had automatic start/stop enabled.  (we apologize, as it's not the best/most clear setting). 

[RobbieH]

Quick update:

TestDisk could see the partition, but could not recover it.

Recuva - neat app but it can't copy out from RAW partitions.

EaseUS looked really promising. It could see a lot of the data on the RAW partition, but really not the stuff I needed.

THEN I GOT TO THINKING - wait a minute, I made a copy of all that data onto another VM on my server. Sure enough, pretty much everything I needed back was sitting right there. I had forgotten I did that. So as far as data loss goes, I have to re-rip my movies, but that's OK, I knew the risk when I didn't duplicate them. I work from home so it's really not a big deal to put in the ones I want to have on hand for now.

I'll get this 8TB drive tested using Seatools and see if I need to send it back or not and go from there. Once I get it all set back up I'll go over the Scanner settings.

Thanks!

[RobbieH]

Seatools came back clean. I have reattached the drive. I opened Scanner and it is already scanning the drive. So, I'll let that finish for now...

[RobbieH]

On 2/14/2018 at 8:37 PM, Christopher (Drashna) said:

As for StableBit Scanner, if the last check was on 2017, then you may not have had automatic start/stop enabled.  (we apologize, as it's not the best/most clear setting). 

The automatic start/stop button at the top is "pushed", for lack of a better term.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

21 hours ago, RobbieH said:

wait a minute, I made a copy of all that data onto another VM on my server

Glad to hear it! 

this is part of why we recommend duplication, in fact.  if something does go wrong, it's a simple fix 90% of the time. 

 

1 hour ago, RobbieH said:

The automatic start/stop button at the top is "pushed", for lack of a better term.

If it's pushed/highlighted/etc, then that's what you want. 

If it's not scanning every 30 days, then it should tell you why. Or it is outside of the work window. 

[bzowk]

Posted to wrong topic