Hard drive now showing as RAW, why?

[M]

I have a second hard drive in my PC and now all the files appear to be lost
and in device manager the file system is showing as RAW.

When I try to access the drive I get the message

F:\ is not accessible
The file or directory is corrupt and unreadable

I would like to know what has caused this and how to fix it, I was under the
impression that NTFS kept four copies of the file allocation tables so this
should be restorable.

 

[Patrick Keenan]

I have a second hard drive in my PC and now all the files appear to be lost
and in device manager the file system is showing as RAW.

When I try to access the drive I get the message

F:\ is not accessible
The file or directory is corrupt and unreadable

I would like to know what has caused this and how to fix it, I was under
the impression that NTFS kept four copies of the file allocation tables so
this should be restorable.

How valuable is the data on the drive?

It's impossible say, given this information, what exactly caused it, but
your best bet for now is to consider this a data recovery task.

If the data is of value, shut down and remove the disk. Install another
disk with enough space to contain all the files of the damaged one. You
cannot recover data from that drive to itself; you must recover to another
disk.

Turn System Restore OFF so that there is no chance of writing to the damaged
disk. If this is an issue, perform these tasks on another system.

Attach the damaged disk using something like a USB2 drive case or adapter
(around $20 - $30).

Install data recovery software and use it to scan the failed drive for
recoverable data. There is a large variety of software for this, and
virtually all have demo versions that will show what can be recovered. If
it looks promising, pay for it and get the full version. Let it run - this
can take hours.

Google "data recovery software".

HTH
-pk

 

[Neil]

You can try Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software a file and
partition recovery utility which recovers lost data from formated or
inaccessible hard drive. It also recovers the data lost due to
software malfunction, viruses, file/directory deletion or even
sabotage.
Stellar Phoenix provides RAW file recovery features which recognizes &
recovers more than 300 file types including documents, spreadsheets,
web content & images.
For more information visit: http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm