Storage Solutions HELP: 2TB HDD not accessible after OS reinstall

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mjumrani

Forerunner
Guys help

My 2TB HDD is no longer accessible after I reinstalled win 7.

It is visible in my computer though.

I have no clue why this is happening.

It has all my yet to be watched stuff and my family videos and picture backups

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what about disk management see the status there, what kinda partition its showing there?
 
It is showing the partition

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Then see if you can do chkdsk on the partition.

Right click on the drive and select Properties. Select Tools tab and do the Check now option. Tick the first option.
 
dude.. observe your disk management screenshot.. Your 2 TB HDD shows file system as RAW. this basically happens for harddrives that havent been formatted at all and there is not filesystem written. all other drives either have NTFS or FAT32 file system..

now what you can try is this:

go to cmd prompt and type this command: >>> convert M: /fs:ntfs

i am not sure if this command will work as this is basically for converting file system . but your HDD doesnt have a filesystem at all.

one more thing you can try is connecting your HDD to a linux OS. there have been lot of instances where problems like this have been solved with linux. if it gets detected in linux, you can backup all your data and then properly format the HDD.

else, the last option would be just to perform a quick format, and then use a recovery tool like recuva to get your data back. most of it should get recovered. But make sure to recover the whole data on a separate drive, else, a lot of data will be lost as the recovered data will overwrite the sectors.
 
dude.. observe your disk management screenshot.. Your 2 TB HDD shows file system as RAW. this basically happens for harddrives that havent been formatted at all and there is not filesystem written. all other drives either have NTFS or FAT32 file system..

now what you can try is this:

go to cmd prompt and type this command: >>> convert M: /fs:ntfs

i am not sure if this command will work as this is basically for converting file system . but your HDD doesnt have a filesystem at all.

one more thing you can try is connecting your HDD to a linux OS. there have been lot of instances where problems like this have been solved with linux. if it gets detected in linux, you can backup all your data and then properly format the HDD.

else, the last option would be just to perform a quick format, and then use a recovery tool like recuva to get your data back. most of it should get recovered. But make sure to recover the whole data on a separate drive, else, a lot of data will be lost as the recovered data will overwrite the sectors.

The CMD command says that the drive already in NTFS format. All the partition recovery tools say the same.

Why is windows showing it as raw then?

Then see if you can do chkdsk on the partition.

Right click on the drive and select Properties. Select Tools tab and do the Check now option. Tick the first option.

Drive is not accessible.
 
this happens if some sectors all major part of the data on the HDD gets corrupted. .this is known to happen in 2TB and 3TB HDD's. They have much less reliability. The max I recommend anyone to buy is 1TB.. this is because, with the current file systems and technology that we have, 2 TB is the theoretical max limit that can be there in these hard drives. WD was the first one to be able to come up with 3TB. (dont know how) But 2TB and 3TB is like pushing them to their capacity limits.. and pushing anything to their limits is never advised.

now, what you can try is booting from linux or some apple computer if you have access, otherwise just format the HDD properly and try recovering as much data as you can. most of your imp. data should be recovered as due to the HDD being inaccessible, there have been no overwrites on the files..
 
this happens if some sectors all major part of the data on the HDD gets corrupted. .this is known to happen in 2TB and 3TB HDD's. They have much less reliability. The max I recommend anyone to buy is 1TB.. this is because, with the current file systems and technology that we have, 2 TB is the theoretical max limit that can be there in these hard drives. WD was the first one to be able to come up with 3TB. (dont know how) But 2TB and 3TB is like pushing them to their capacity limits.. and pushing anything to their limits is never advised.

now, what you can try is booting from linux or some apple computer if you have access, otherwise just format the HDD properly and try recovering as much data as you can. most of your imp. data should be recovered as due to the HDD being inaccessible, there have been no overwrites on the files..

I'm not sure what you are going on about but I am using 1 TB disks and 2 TB disks in my computer and they run just fine.

@OP: If the data on the drive is absolutely required and needs to be recovered, find out locally the most reputed Data Recovery shop and drop it off.

I would suggest not to tinker with the hard disk unless you know what you are doing, coz you might make it more hard to recover the data without knowing.

If you can do without the data, partition it into 2 1TB partitions and start using it. That is how I am using my drives. Also not sure why I see 3 Active drives
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In future whenever you reinstall the OS on your machine disconnect all the drives that are used for only dumping data and proceed with the installation. Once the installation is done, reconnect them back. This is just to be safe and there is no scientific reason for this
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@ problem

what recovery software you have tried? partition table/weird mbr can make disk unaccessible, try to fix them. I would suggest PTD (partition table doctor)

Formating HDD will significantly increase chance of data loss, consider it as a final option.
 
I'm not sure what you are going on about but I am using 1 TB disks and 2 TB disks in my computer and they run just fine.

@OP: If the data on the drive is absolutely required and needs to be recovered, find out locally the most reputed Data Recovery shop and drop it off.

I would suggest not to tinker with the hard disk unless you know what you are doing, coz you might make it more hard to recover the data without knowing.

If you can do without the data, partition it into 2 1TB partitions and start using it. That is how I am using my drives. Also not sure why I see 3 Active drives
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In future whenever you reinstall the OS on your machine disconnect all the drives that are used for only dumping data and proceed with the installation. Once the installation is done, reconnect them back. This is just to be safe and there is no scientific reason for this
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hey dj, no sorry. .i am not generalizing. infact even i am planning to buy a 2TB HDD.(waiting for prices to come down) its just that, the 2TB and 3TB have had a higher failure record than smaller sized HDD's .
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ofcourse, it doesnt happen frequently.

i am just trying to say that the higher capacity drives have a higher chance of any problems occurring.. thats all ..
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#mjumrani Format the drive to NTFS. Data will still be there as long as it's not overwritten. Use GetBackData for NTFS. It may run for hours to build the MBR file list. After it get's completed, you can see the file list and can recover it.
 
#mjumrani Format the drive to NTFS. Data will still be there as long as it's not overwritten. Use GetBackData for NTFS. It may run for hours to build the MBR file list. After it get's completed, you can see the file list and can recover it.

yep. correct.. one more file recovery free software >>> Recuva.. nice little piece of software.. no adware nothing..
 
Hey guys. thanks you for the responses.

Here is the situation,

Everything from CMD to a recovery software shows the drive to be currently in NTFS format, so partition recovery is out.

Only Disk Management is showing the disk as RAW.

The disk is not appearing in the bios
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but it is there is windows. Thus I cannot fix the MBR using windows recovery disc as the HDD is just not visible at boot time.

I did run a software to find all the files on the drive and I have found all of them, only issue is that I will have to create almost 1Tb of space from somewhere.

I will put in a few screen shots when I get home.

Is there any way to fix the drive without having to copy the data all over the rest of my drives?

@ problem

what recovery software you have tried? partition table/weird mbr can make disk unaccessible, try to fix them. I would suggest PTD (partition table doctor)

Formating HDD will significantly increase chance of data loss, consider it as a final option.

PTD does not work with win7
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Here are a few screenshots while the drive is still inaccessible.

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And here is the screenshot where a partition recovery software will not work.

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Just right click on My computer- click on manage- click on storage- go to disk management- then add your 2 Tb drive from there.

the same thing happened to me i use to install my os in 1Tb drive and i am also using 160gb drive which was not visible and i fixed it from the same procedure with all my data in it.

Hope this helps.
 
Glad to hear that you are able to see the files. Just borrow a HD from your friends like others have suggested.
 
I gathered all my portables and emptied my internal HDDs. I think I have enough space to copy the data.

Its such a sad and long process.

#vaibhav1 dude what are you saying? Read the whole thread please.

UPDATE:

Most recovery softwares were not able to recover the folder structure and sometimes the proper file name.

I found one software but the recovery is very slow, only 300GB copied in the last 8 hours
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