Unreadable files system on Hard Disk Drive

[Paulino]

Hello there, My desktop computer is running on Windows XP. I have 2 hard drive which are connected to the computer. Out of the two drives, 1 is Western Digital 160gb hard drive which was working fine till now. This drive is basically used as a storage. Recently i gave it to my friend for sometime and when he returned the drive, Windows is not able to detect the file system on the drive. Windows detects the drive as RAW. I dont know what the problem is. The data on the drive is very important so i dont want to format the drive. If there is any way in which i can save my data, please let me know.

[deoWo]

Windows shows the file system of the drive as RAW when it is not able to detect the actual format of the drive. It is possible that the drive must have developed some file system error. File system error in hard drive is mostly because of power cuts while the data is written on the drive. If there is sudden power cut while writing the data it creates false entries in the file allocation table which creates problem in further detection of the drive.

[Fabian]

Ask your friend if the drive has sustained any physical damage or not? As the file system of the drive is corrupted which is only possible if the hard drive has sustained a physical damage. Hard disk is a magnetic data storage medium. It consist of a magnetic disk which stores the data in magnetic form. This data gets manipulated if the disk sustains any physical shock. The magnetic field on the disk changes due to physical shock which changes the file system of the drive. Hence the Windows is detecting the drive as RAW.

[Maxforu]

Check the hard disk consistency by running CHKDSK utility in windows. It is possible that the hard drive has developed bad sectors due to which it is not getting detected by the windows. CHKDSK will scan the hard disk for any such errors and will give a summarized report on it. If the errors found are repairable the Utility will prompt you to repair them, but if the errors are non repairable then the hard drive has to be replaced.

[T.J.]

I dont see that there is other option than formatting the drive again. I know you have important data on the drive which you dont want to lose, but there is nothing much you can do about that. As the drive does not contain an Operating system on it, you will just have to right click on the drive and select format. I will suggest that you format the drive using NTFS system as it provides good security and data backup facility. You can try connecting the drive to other computer and see if gets detected, if it gets detected then you will be able to get the back-up without any issue.

[Hardwareman]

You can give your hard disk to a local data recovery shop and see if they can help. Data recovery vendors can take back-up of the data even if the hard drive is not working. Take your hard disk to them and see how much they charge for the backup. Also there are some data recovery tools available online which can help in recovering data from the hard drive. I dont know if it will work for you but you can still give it try before actually formatting it.