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Hi,

I just joined the site today as I am having with my HDD. Everything worked fine and I was only using it as an extra storage unit for my music and then something went wrong. My computer started to freeze so I gave it a good clean and it seems to have stopped the freezing but now I can't access the drive . It is reading as RAW data and keeps asking me to format the drive, but I don't want to lose the data I spent so long building up.

I have run checks but everything seems to be working ok, the device manager see's no problems, but I don't know where to go from here. I don't have another pc to check it on, nor do I want to risk anyone else's.

Does anyone have any idea's? Is there any software I could use or it there anything on line perhaps that could help me access the HDD long enough to export the data?

Murnic

Hey Murnic,

The PC will freeze if it has problems accessing the data on the storage device. If it is showing as RAW, this means it is not able to read file system on this disk, and is most likely corrupt.

It sounds like you kept no backups of your data, so lets look at restoration, which really depends on how important this data is to you. There are various options, including data recovery services that do charge quite a bit, however they are very good. There are software options too. The best and most reliable software I've used, and will always recommend is R-Studio, however it does still come with a price tag. (I have not yet found an effective free option to this kind of data recovery): File Recovery and Data Recovery Software. Hard Drive recovery utility

At least using the software option, you can download the trial version and see how much of the data is retreivable before purchasing the software. However it's important to note that the more the partition is messed around with using various recovery tools, the less of the data your are likely to be able to get back. Also, you will need some space on another drive to restore the data to.

EDIT: Marked as Answered.