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Hard Drive Not Formatted?

By mikemusica ·
Hey guys,

Firstly, I'd like to say hello to everyone in the forum. I'm a pretty frequent observer but have never put a word in. But now I've got a problem of my own and I'm officially stumped.

I had an HP DV8000 with 2 internal 500GB drives which recently stopped working (fan related). Since I have some very important client information stored on these drives that weren't backed up (I perform an automatic backup every morning 3am) I figured what I'd do is simply buy another DV8000, place the drives from the defunct laptop to the "new" one. Boy, was I wrong.

I buy the "new' laptop only to find out that the drive is PATA instead of SATA like on my old laptop. I then purchased an Apricorn 3-in-1 adapter to be able to transfer my files over. Not so easy: XP recognizes the drive but it appears as RAW and when I double click the drive it reads "Disk is not formatted. Would you like to format now?". Of course I click no.

I've tried data recover programs and other methods of recovering the data but I'm confused as to why I should even go in that direction because the drives were brand new when my laptop died.

I'm running WindowsXP Pro.
HPDV8000

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

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Well here it all depends on how the Drives

by OH Smeg In reply to Hard Drive Not Formatted?

In the dead NB where configured.

If they where part of a RAID Array they will be unreadable in a Single use Situation and you'll need to either repair the dead NB or send them to a Data Recovery Specialist who can work with RAID Arrays.

You'll need to know what type of RAID Array they where in to even begin to think about Data Recovery Apps as different Applications work with different Systems and most do not work with RAID Arrays.

Col

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Drive corruption

by scndtnr In reply to Hard Drive Not Formatted?

seems to be a likely diagnosis, particularly if the laptop overheated (an assumption, I know, but that's what a fan failure will cause). I doubt the drives were in a RAID configuration; if they were separate drives, you might be able to recover them after running a few passes of chkdsk.

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agree with the two above posts

by markp24 In reply to Hard Drive Not Formatted?

You may also want to try booting a live linux CD to do the data transfer, i have had a rare instance where windows would not read the drive, yet linux read it fine. so you can download an ISO, write it to cd/dvd and boot from it, then transefer the data from the "bad" drives to the good drives (if this idea works)

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Likelihood

by mikemusica In reply to Hard Drive Not Formatted?

Will try that, guys! Thanks.

So let me ask you guys a question: I'll just begin by saying both drives we brand spanking new (about 2 weeks old). How likely is it that they both went bad?

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Reponse To Answer

by OH Smeg In reply to Likelihood

While possible it's not likely

Though if you test them with their Drive Makers Testing Utility it will tell you one way or the other straight away.

Though Overheating is a form of Drive Failure and if they have been overheated they will have a shorter life. You can get the Makers Testing Utility from the Drive Makers Web Site or from the Ultimate Boot CD which is available to download free here

http://download.cnet.com/Ultimate-Boot-CD/3000-2130_4-51584.html?tag=mncol;9

Col

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CHKDSK failed

by mikemusica In reply to Hard Drive Not Formatted?

I just tried running chkdsk and it says it is not available for RAW drives. I am going to try the bootdisk method.

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Reponse To Answer

by OH Smeg In reply to CHKDSK failed

Did you try CHKDSK or CHKDSK /r?

There is a difference between the 2.

Col

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CHKDSK

by mikemusica In reply to Hard Drive Not Formatted?

Absolutely did. Same result.

Update: I used UBCD to run some diagnostics and the drives are healthy & no bad sectors were found. No partitions are found either.

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In that case

by OH Smeg In reply to Hard Drive Not Formatted?

It appears that when the system died it took the Partition Tables along with it.

You'll have to attack the drive/s with some form of Data Recovery Software if you can afford to loose all of the data or send them to a Data Recovery Specialist if you have to get the data back. The more you unsuccessfully mess with the drives the more expensive and less likely to get a 100% Recovery you'll be.

Col

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