Hard drives not being read

[craig190]

Hi Guys,

Hope you can help me with this one.

I had a Dell XPS running Windows Vista, everyuthing going well until the motherboard burnt out. (Dell quoted $330 plus shipping for a new one!!).

I removed the hard drives (Hitachi 750Gb and Seagate 750Gb), purchased an external HDD enclosure (vantec Nexstar) and hooked each drive up to another machine (PC running Windows 7 and 2 Laptops running XP). As soon as the drives are connected it tells me to format them. If I do this I will lose all my data (I was just about to back up before the motherboard burnt out). I never had a problem with either of these drives before and am 99% sure that the data is stilll there, but I can't access it. I have downloaded the following free software (Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery, SeaTools for windows, FindandMount, Easus Partition Master Home edition, Recover data for windows and Compuapps Swissknife V3) Swissknife apparently doesnt work with W7, but the others are telling me the hard drives are RAW and can't read any data?

Is there an other way to recover the data?

Thanks in advance

[Rich-M]

Try plugging them into other sata ports internally and do not use the enclosure. Make certain you use power plug and sata cables on each.

[fzabkar]

I suspect that the OP may have a 4KB sectored enclosure, in which case a drive with a 512-byte file system would be detected as RAW.

See the following thread:
MHDD : can it access USB-connected, 4k-sectored disks ? : Software

I would suggest that the OP view the physical external drive using a disc editor such as DMDE (freeware).

DMDE (DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery):
Download DMDE Free Edition - DMDE (DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery Software)

DMDE will tell you if the external mass storage device is using 4KB LBAs.