Discussion on:

How could I recover my drive from RAW?

I installed Ubuntu to a 60GB external hard drive i have (EXT4). Ubuntu installed fine and i was able to boot into it.
When I went to access my data drive Gbut nothing was there. To my utter horror, the drive has been replaced with a RAW file system, attempting to access the drive brings an error about not being able to access the drive due to an unknown file system.
Is the drive now completely wiped or do I have a chance to recovery? I have around 200GB important data on there and I cannot afford professional data recovery. What could I do?

And what was it originally formatted to run?

All Nix Distros should read most Partition Types but Windows OS are unable to read anything but Windows Partition Types without third Party Software. For more information on this try reading this TR Blog on Enable the mounting of ext2/3 file systems on a Windows machine here

http://www.techrepublic .com/blog/itdojo/enable-the-mounting-of-ext23-file-systems-on-a-windows-machine/3698?tag=content;siu-container
remember to remove the space from between terchrepublic and the .com for a working link.

Col

Do you have a recent disk backup? If you can restore your backup and it is RECENT, you have
some hope of recovering most of your data or, perhaps all of it.. How much can be recovered depends strongly on how often you make disk backups!

Making regular disk backups may seem like a waste of time UNTIL your data is missing or corrupt and there IS no recent backup! If you cannot recover, I hope you have other salable skills.

I only know windows, but something similar happened to me recently. Linux distros could read anything, so I had to get some partition recovery software that I could run from the bootable OS drive. I haven't tried TestDisc,
Copy files from deleted FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3/ext4 partitions: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

It can be a very big pain in the posterior trying to get something to give a good result after a scan as they pick up all kinds of partition boot records that have ever been formatted on the drive. Search for partition recovery software, and file recovery software. One of the best I used was called Active Partition Recovery. It takes some experience, by just installing and using these tools. After a while - 1 hour or so - I got comfortable using them. Just do not try to intialize or reformat anything, which you probably already know! Any DOS or live CD tools might write to the lost drive, so beware of that. Always make sure you save any reports to the correct drive that has your bootable OS or data partitions on it.
Active Part. Rec. was really good for this, and I think you can even make an image of your drive, even if it shows as RAW, for back-ups!

I did lose my data partition and the located files on it were not good enough quality to recover. I did get another partition recovered, though.

Good luck!

Raw file system drive is not a serious problem as long as you format it to change the RAW into its previous NTFS or FAT. But, considering about you data inside this RAW drive, you should run a free hard drive recovery tool to get back your data firstly before the format.

Here is the free hard drive recovery tool for you:
http://www.squidoo.com/free-to-convert-external-hard-drive-from-raw-to-ntfs
This freeware always works well because many of my friends have tried it to restore their inaccessible data. The result shows that it can retrieve 80% of your data at least. You should try it!

Important note:
You should not put new data on this drive to rewrite the original data in case of data loss.
You should not format this drive unless you've recovered all your data completely.
You should back up your data regularly in the future.