External disc has changed to RAW

sniperone

sniperone

sniperone

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I have this 1tb back up disc that just sits on my desk and yesterday after backing up some data from some memory cards the drive no longer reads . Window wants me to format the drive but thats a big no no as i will loose my data . Disk management shows the drive as RAW format . What has happened here can anyone help?
 
I ran chkdsk and i get a insufficient memory error . I can see my files using EaseUS data recover trail so the disk is readable but dont want to pay £70 to recover if possible .
 
This sounds like a recurrence of the win10 problem, where after anniversary update some non-boot partitions ONLY APPEARED to be raw,
I thought folks could still access them from win7 though, to get the contents off onto another drive,
folks impacted had to wait for MS to fix this.
I made some older OC posts on this, but it was principally because of this I abandoned win10 - sorry not very helpfu, but maybe a direction.
 
Can you try a Linux boot disk? You might be able to use diskpart to change it from RAW back to NTFS although I'm not sure there's a way without it wanting to clean/format the drive.
 
As above, bang Ubuntu on a USB stick and boot the live mode.

Check the drive out, copy files to dropbox or another USB device and you've backups in case you have to format
 
It might be a corrupted partition. Try TestDisk, in my experience it's usually pretty good at recovering them.

This might help:

If you have the space take a full image backup of the drive, not because that tool will cause a problem, but it's a good idea before you try any recovery method.
 
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