External Drive is showing as RAW

[Dajiang]

Suddenly my external drive that I was using for Paragon backup of my C drive is showing as RAW in Disk Management when it used to be NTFS. So now I cannot see it in Windows explorer. Strangely, Paragon HDM says it is NTFS and sees the directory structure. If I try to do a Convert File System, Paragon fails with an error message saying Invalid Cluster size.

How do I get my disk back?

Help appreciated please.

[tgell]

A RAW disk means that Windows sees it as unformated. You might want to try TestDisk to recover the partition table. I am not sure if TestDisk will see the USB drive. If it does not see the drive and it is in an enclosure, remove it from the enclosure and install it as a slave in a desktop computer and try again. Otherwise you may have to purchase the below mentioned programs to recover your data then partition and format the drive. If the data is not important, you should be able to partition and format the drive from within windows or use a GPARTed (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/) Live CD.

TestDisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk)

Documentation (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step)

There are paid software that will recover data on a RAW disk. "Recover my Files (http://www.recovermyfiles.com/)" and "Easeus Disk Recovery Wizard (http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/)" are two. I believe both will let you try to see if anything can be recovered before you purchase a license.

[Cutting_Edgetech]

I had the same problem with 2 Western Digital external drives. Explorer in windows did not even recognize that the drive was connected. I tried everything possible to make windows recognize the drive, and nothing worked. I purchased Filescavenger, and recovered the data to a new drive. It worked for me.

[aigle]

File Scavenger is the best I think.

[Dajiang]

I have got my drive back.

I used Partition Wizard Home Edition to recover the partition information and then assigned a drive letter to the drive.

Thanks all for your comments

[tgell]

-{ Quote: "I have got my drive back.

I used Partition Wizard Home Edition to recover the partition information and then assigned a drive letter to the drive.

Thanks all for your comments" }-

I forgot about Partition Wizard's partition recovery. For being free, it's an excellent program.

[SIW2]

Doesn't your edition of Paragon have a partition undelete function ?

It is an excellent feature - it doesn't come with the free BR10 , though.

Glad you got it sorted out.