Member Avatar for rhogg

I had a problem with my PC when turning on it came up with an Inacessible Boot Device

after a couple of turning off and on again it now says that there is no OS how do i recover files that are on there i have tried putting it on another PC and when i go to my computer it does show as a drive i tried running check disk and it says " The type of file system is RAW Chkdsk is not availible for RAW Drives

Please help there is some important documents on this drive once i can recover info i will put XP on machine

thanks Rob

Ps sorry for the essay

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As described, Windows can still see the disk but the filesystem appears unusable. Stop any further writes: do not run repairs or reinstall the OS on that disk and do not initialize or format it. Making a sector-by-sector copy and working from the copy is the safest way to preserve recoverable data.

Make an image of the entire disk onto a different physical drive before attempting repairs. For drives that show read errors, use a tool that tolerates bad sectors and keeps a progress log so you can resume attempts. GNU ddrescue is designed for this; run it from a rescue environment and write the image to another drive with plenty of free space. Example workflow:

ddrescue -f -n /dev/sdX /mnt/large-drive/image.img /mnt/large-drive/ddrescue.log
ddrescue -d -r3 /dev/sdX /mnt/large-drive/image.img /mnt/large-drive/ddrescue.log

After you have a good image, try non-destructive recovery tools against the image first. TestDisk can search for lost partitions and repair boot sectors while preserving filenames when successful; PhotoRec and other file-carvers will extract file contents by signature if the filesystem metadata is too damaged, though filenames and folder structure are usually lost. Both tools work against image files, which keeps your original safe (see TestDisk/PhotoRec at CGSecurity).

Before heavy recovery attempts, check the drive health with SMART (smartctl from smartmontools) so you know whether the problem is logical or physical. If SMART shows severe failures, or if imaging repeatedly fails, professional recovery may be the only safe option. If comfortable with GUI commercial tools there are paid packages that can help, but they should also be run against the image copy, not the original. Finally, once data is recovered, install the OS on a different drive and then validate the recovered files.

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Member Avatar for Dogtree

Ouch. Sounds like a serious corruption. You can try a live Linux CD like Knoppix to recover the data, but it's possible that it's a loss unless you want to pay for expensive professional recovery.

Member Avatar for techniner

There are a fe woptions to try before hitting the panic button... Data Recovery serivices will want HUGE amounts of money and your first born...

So lets start from the top.....

First:
Have you tried fidsk /mbr in recovery mode?

Next..

Boot to Linux mount the drive vfat and see if you can see the data...


Finally..

Slave the drive into another win system and seewhat happens..

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