Unplugged HDD and plugged it back and now is RAW

thedvniel · September 27, 2020

Hi guys, I bought a new SSD but is wasn't getting recognized. I shutdown my computer, unplugged one of my HDD's and plugged the SSD in. Booted the computer and saw it was getting recognized. It was good news.
Once again, I turned off the computer, unplugged the SSD and plugged back the HDD. The problem was that the HDD was no longer working as it was before. It was getting recognized as RAW.
This very HDD was my storage unit, where all the files from /Desktop, /Documents, etc were storaged. Basically I lost every single piece of data that I had.
In the Disk Manager it shows one partion as missing (basically the position the HDD was ocuppying) and the same HDD as RAW.

What should I do?

kokosnh · September 28, 2020

It wasn’t probably shut down, just hibernated. check your Windows settings,
you probably just damaged the MBR, the data on HDD is probably still intact.

quick way is to just boot a live CD with ubuntu, it should mount it and see all the files.

to repair the MBR, just use minitool 9.1 free And partition recovery, then run quick skan, then find the deleted partitions, and write them to the HDD.
there are at least 2 other programu that have the same UI and ability, I just use minitool.

Well i won’t take any responsibility for that ofcourse, it’s on your risk.

thedvniel · September 29, 2020

2 hours ago, kokosnh said:

It wasn’t probably shut down, just hibernated. check your Windows settings,
you probably just damaged the MBR, the data on HDD is probably still intact.

quick way is to just boot a live CD with ubuntu, it should mount it and see all the files.

to repair the MBR, just use minitool 9.1 free And partition recovery, then run quick skan, then find the deleted partitions, and write them to the HDD.
there are at least 2 other programu that have the same UI and ability, I just use minitool.

Well i won’t take any responsibility for that ofcourse, it’s on your risk.

Thanks for your answer man. Infortunately I didn't saw it on time and use a software to retrieve the data in RAW mode (got the files but without any names which is almost the same thing as losing it tbh) and formatted the unit. I wish I saw this earlier...

kokosnh · October 1, 2020

if you only fast format the HDD, and not write any data to it, then it's still all there, but well the ubuntu won't help you now.

Only partition recovery (if you didn't write anything to it), or some data recovery software (to get the data, far from the starting sector, that haven't been overwritten yet, I'm talking about some easeus free version, it can recover 500MB of files for free, beware of the cracks, lots of trojans in them). There are some license key out there for some versions quie cheap. But don't trust the key generators, there are trojans in them too.