Toshiba 1T Portable Harddisk become RAW

[kkgorilla]

Dear all,

I have a 1T Toshiba portable harddisk, no partition, I used it fresh out from the box. One day I plugged in and the system asked to format the disk before I can use it, and in Disk Management it shows as RAW.

I did some research and it lead me to TestDisk, I have tried to fixed it but not successful.

I have been trying to fixed it with two machine, one from work is running Window 7 64bit (I have no administrator right) and the one from home running on Window Vista 32bit. I hope it will not create any additional problem by mixing the two. I did observed the autodetect by the two systems are different though...

Below are the screen I have captured.

I started testdisk, after create log this is what I see:

When I run this with my laptop (Window Vista) it auto detect it as [intel], but with my PC (Window 7) it detected [None]. I have not partitioned this disk and [None] should be the correct choice? I have selected [intel] as what I did with my laptop.

I don't seems to be able to do anything so I go back to the previous menu and selected "Analyse", and I see again:

and follow by "Quick Search", after that the search jump quickly to 10/121600 as shown:

And it seems to take forever to advance from here, is it normal? Normally how long does it take to analyse the whole 1T disk?

Please help to advise if I am going along the right path.

Thanks a lot!

[networks]

The Intel Partition type is what you want to select. The read errors are not a good sign of a healthy hard drive nor is the fact it now shows up as RAW. I assume your attempting to recover your data off the drive ? Have you ran any diagnostics on the drive like Seagate Seatools ? A 1TB drive will take many many hours on the advanced scan to complete but if the drive is having "other errors" that time can easily double or triple. Normally we attempt to get a clone image of the hard drive to another drive the same size or larger to recover the data that way if any mistakes are made your not working on your ONLY copy of the data. DIY recovery has risks for certain it just depends on the value of the data for you.

[Ponch]

I have not partitioned this disk and [None] should be the correct choice?

"Not partitioned" is a confusing expression as it could mean both "not divided" (means one big partition) and "unpartitioned" (means no partition).

Because you have not partitioned the drive doesn't mean that there is no partition.

First you should understand that there was at least one partition, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to use the drive at all (as drive E:). Also it is possible that there were other partitions created by the manufacturer that are not appearing in your Windows Explorer because they are not assigned a drive letter by the running OS (either after action from the user or because the file system on the partition is not recognized/supported by the OS). These partitions should still have been visible in Disk management before your problem. Maybe they still are and only your main partition has a problem.

For the rest, you should choose Intel indeed. Then maybe you can change the type of the partition "1" to NTFS. Depending how important your data is, you might wait for confirmation before doing anything.

[jaclaz]

If you ever wrote data on that disk it means that it has been partitioned (in at least one partition).

A disk partitioned means that a partition table has been written to it's first sector, if out of the 4 possible partition entries in the table only one is used, the disk is partitioned (in a single partition).

Instead of providing screenshots, run TESTDISK with a log option, and post the log.

Unfortunately the read errors you are getting are NO good news.

What you should do would be to stop fiddling with that disk drive, procure yourself a bigger disk drive and image the device, using a tool capable of either ignoring errors or doing partial images.

Under Windows I would use Datarescuedd:

http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/v3/drdd.htm

along the "partial" approach described here:

and yes, you will need a third hard disk same size as the failed one or bigger to attempt recomposing the image.

jaclaz