Member Avatar for Tcll

so... last night I was working on transferring files from the drive and all...
I shut down, removed the HDD this morning to take a .img from 2 other HDDs that went RAW,
but when I inserted the drive into my brothers compy (the only compy that supports both IDE AND SATA), the HDD comes up as RAW.

how can an HDD go RAW with no power... o_0

anyways... I can't recover cause I don't have 300GB to recover to...
how can I go about repairing the RAW partition back to the way it was before??
(perhapse doing a scan and building a custom MFT using the existing MFT and files on the drive)

Edited by Tcll
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Dani AI

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Short expert summary and a low-risk plan that builds on and : a drive that suddenly shows RAW almost always means the NTFS metadata (the partition/MBR, the NTFS boot sector, or the MFT pointer) is damaged — not the user data itself. Since the partition type is already 07 and partition-table edits didn’t help, focus on the NTFS structures: preserve them first, then try a non-destructive rebuild of the boot sector / MFT mirror before attempting any full-scale recovery or running fixes that write to the volume.

Immediate, practical steps (minimal extra space required)

  • Stop all writes to the disk. Do not initialize or format. Mount the drive read-only or attach it as a secondary drive.

  • Make tiny sector-level backups (these are small files — kilobytes/megabytes, not hundreds of GB): the MBR (first 512 bytes), the partition boot sector (first sector of the NTFS partition) and a small head of the partition (first 1 MiB). On Linux a simple dd set saves these:

    # run as root, replace /dev/sdX and /dev/sdX1 with correct devices
dd if=/dev/sdX of=~/disk_mbr.bin bs=512 count=1
dd if=/dev/sdX of=~/disk_first1M.img bs=1M count=1
dd if=/dev/sdX1 of=~/part_first1M.img bs=1M count=1

    Those images are small and can be stored on any of the smaller drives listed in the thread.

Repair workflow (non-destructive first)

  • Use a read-only-capable repair tool that can rebuild the NTFS boot sector and use the $MFTMirr to restore the MFT (TestDisk or similar tools offer “repair boot” / “repair MFT” functions). Let the tool compare the main boot sector and its backup and attempt a rebuild first.
  • Only if a valid NTFS boot sector is restored, then run consistency checks on a copy (not the original). Avoid running chkdsk on the damaged original — it can rewrite metadata and make recovery harder.
  • If automated repair fails, try a file-system-aware inspector that can read $MFT and $MFTMirr (DMDE, R-Studio, etc.) to extract or rebuild entries. If that still fails, professional recovery may be required.

Notes and cautions

  • The short-sector backups above take negligible space and let repair attempts be reversed. Mentioned partition edits were a reasonable first step, but with type 07 already set the next step is metadata repair, not further partition-table surgery. Running repairs without the tiny backups risks permanent changes; the backups enable safe rollback.

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Member Avatar for Tcll

ok, so my compy is now back up and running, and low-and-behold, the disk is still RAW
I only have 77GB free on this HDD, 56GB free on my 200GB HDD, and about ~80GB free totaled on 6 other 40-160GB HDDs

I can't do a recover and reformat...

can someone tell me what I can do to repair my HDD??
(my in-dev program is on this HDD, along with many other important documents)

Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

This might be tricky but you could try to edit the partition table on the disk. You could try this free one. Make sure you save a copy of the initial values before you start changing them. If you need to get more "intimate" with the disk you can try . You can download and use a trial version. HexProbe allows you to edit the disk directly. I've used it to change a disk signature which is something not allowed by a simple partition editor.

Member Avatar for Tcll

if HexProbe is just your typical hex editor, HxD is a free replacement.
(I don't use trials unless they're recommended) :P

but I'll try that PTE. :)
hopefully I'll get somewhere with that :P

Member Avatar for gerbil

diskpart? Set it back to type 07

Member Avatar for Tcll

it already is... heh
that program couldn't do anything...

anyone know a good byte-reference to the NTFS format??
it's prbly a broken pointer to the MFT >_>

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