Portable HD - data lost?

Hi All,

Recently converted my desktop back from windows 8 to windows 7. Backed up all files onto my portable USB HD first. On turning the drive on last night to copy the files back to the refreshed desktop it didn’t seem to recognise it. I went into the disk management area and assigned it a drive letter and now it says that it needs formatting before it can be used! When I look in the disk management menu it now has a drive letter but says it is RAW?

Tried plugging it into another machine and says exactly the same. I ran a trial piece of software called EaseUS data recovery on it last night and it has found all the files. Unfortunately it wants $70 for the licence or will only recover 1gb of data.

Can anyone help....this HD contains many personal files, photos etc so don't want to lose the data stored on it.

Cheers
Craig

 

Hi shods, welcome to Major Geeks.

What many here use for data recovery is Piriform's Recuva (freeware) [use the FileHippo.com link. Trying to locate downloads on the Piriform site can be difficult at times.]

Recuva (Windows)




Recuva is a user-friendly Windows-based tool. When you run Recuva, you can resurrect missing files using either the file-recovery wizard or the application's manual mode. The file-recovery wizard is handy when you're sure your data is gone but you're not quite sure where it went or how to get it back. The wizard lets you narrow your search type to pictures, music, documents, video, or all files, and you can set the search location to everywhere on your computer, removable media only, in My Documents, the Recycle Bin, or a specified location. If you don't need the wizard you can jump right into manual mode and get to work searching where you know the file should be. Recuva uses a green/yellow/red light system to indicate how probable the recovery of your files will be, and when available, it can provide previews image files available for recovery. Recuva also includes a tool to securely wipe files you find, handy if you're attempting a file recovery just to ensure the files are actually dead and gone.

 

Excellent! Do you know if there is a size restriction on the amount of data it will recover for you free? Many of the other pieces of software seem to just allow 1gb.

 

Hi...thanks for that. Just checked it out further and seen a few comments about not working on RAW devices. My portable HD is currently showing as RAW. Will give it a go though.

Thanks.

 

That's the reason for using Recuva — because your portable drive shows as RAW in Disk Management.

If, in fact, it was a raw drive (had been wiped and there were no partitions set or formatting [to NTFS] done) then it wouldn't work and you would need to use a recovery service (around $800 US).

 

You can also probably try Testdisk as it works pretty well on RAW drives and is completely free.

 

Hi All,

I had success last night! Recuva wouldn't touch it because of its RAW state. But TestDisk has worked a treat and I've been copying items off folder by folder onto my main PC HD.

Thanks for the tips....no I've found this site I'm sure I'll have more questions!

Cheers.