NTFS TO RAW ON REBOOT:
After many days and inquiries I have uncovered what I believe is the cause
of the growing problem of Hard disk drives reverted to RAW file systems form
NTFS file systems. It appears the problem stems for the inability of older
IDE controllers not being able to handle the size of newer HDDs, i.e.
controllers on older mother boards don't know what to do with the
organization of newer HDDs.
Mother boards that go back just few years have on board IDE controllers that
are in affect obsolete with larger HDDs. HDD improvements and increases in
size have out distanced the controllers that are attached to. Most computers
older than a couple of years won't recognize a HDD larger than about 128gbs.
If you put a 200gb HDD in a computer built 3 years ago it will probably show
up as a 128gb or smaller. This is where the problem starts.
HDD manufacturers such as Western Digital have no idea where the drive will
be used i.e. a Mac or a PC, or how old modern the IDE controller is. In
order to meet market demand for larger HDDs most include a disk with
software which is used to fool the controller in to believing the drive is
of a size it can handle, most of the time this works ok, but have a bad put
away (shut down or reboot) and all bets are off. The software gets scrambled
and you no longer have accurate and cleanly misleading instructions for the
controller and you lose you NTFS file system image and it reverts back to
RAW which is the same as having no file system. In essence the Master File
Table gets scrambled. The date is still there just like it was before the
reboot but because the controller does not recognize it, it is indicated as
RAW.
Most inexpensive data recovery software with allow you to see it and copy it
to a good drive a properly formatted drive.
Until the HDD manufacturers do a better job with their "fool the computer
software" and make it more stable this NTFS to RAW will continue to be a
problem. In fact the incidence will probably increase as the drives get
bigger and more people put them in older computers. The other thing that
needs to happen is the manufactures not to provide a small application which
will restore the NTFS nomenclature (so to speak) because the all the files
are still on the imaginary volume
created with their "fool the computer software".
Creating this would be easy, it can be done without a format or without
causing a loss of date.
This other solution for those who want to use the larger HDDs in older
computes is to run cable your drives to an after market newer IDE controller
card plugged into a PCI slot.
In summary the problem is in two areas, connecting newer drives to older
motherboards and the quality of the software being distributed by
manufactures such as Western Digital to exploit a larger market.
The the manufacturers I say provide the second part of the fix, the
application to revert back to NTFS from RAW after a bad restart.
