[Sebons]

Hello techies,

I just bought an USB to IDE/SATA connector for fun and decided to rift through a couple of my old drives. The one I'm looking at now (MAXTOR DiamondMax plus 9 ATA/133 drive), however, doesn't allow me to access one of it's partitions. (I'm on Windows 7 btw)

It has two partitions, one with the system and the other where I must have kept anything else. The system partition opens fine, but the H: demands that I format the drive. In DiskManagement it comes up as RAW filetype.

I'm not tech savvy or anything, but I think the problem has to do with the drive being set to MBR (Master boot)?

Is there anything I can do to make Windows 7 recognize the file system without formatting the drive? I don't believe that the drive is malfunctioning.

Kind regards,
Sebastian

 

[Networks]

Re: Old IDE HDD shows as "RAW" and wants to format partition

Download Partition Find and Mount install it and scan the drive and see if you can mount the partition to copy the files off to another hard drive.

 

[Sebons]

Re: Old IDE HDD shows as "RAW" and wants to format partition

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I installed Partition Mount and Find and searched the drive, but it only found the system drive. I tried Intelligent Scan and Normal Scan, and have started a Thorough Scan, but it's been sitting at 0% for about 15-20 minutes.

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Seb

 

[Networks]

Re: Old IDE HDD shows as "RAW" and wants to format partition

Did the external drive not show up in the first screen ? It may not detect USB connected devices I would have to "test" that to see myself as I always use it on drives connected direct to a SATA or IDE port on the motherboard is that an option ?

 

[Sebons]

Re: Old IDE HDD shows as "RAW" and wants to format partition

Sorry, I misspoke. It sees the external HDD, but it only found the system partition when scanning (Used to be a main drive, with a partition for system and one for random junk).

It's a laptop. I don't know if the USB connection is the problem, but the drive is recognized by the computer.

 

[Networks]

Re: Old IDE HDD shows as "RAW" and wants to format partition

download r-studio in my sig and scan the trial versio the drive with that to see if it finds the missing data

 

[Sebons]

Re: Old IDE HDD shows as "RAW" and wants to format partition

Doing that now.

The estimated time is now at 10 hours, and keeps rising. Can I count on the calculated ET or is it just having trouble calculating? If so I'll have to postpone this.

But, I did stop the scan prior to the one I'm doing now, and I was able to listen to a few audio files that definitely wouldn't be located in the system partition, so that's a good sign, right?

Thank you for your help so far.

Seb.

 

[Networks]

Re: Old IDE HDD shows as "RAW" and wants to format partition

let the scan run for about 30min and check the results. You have to 'buy' the software to be able to recover the data off. The program does let you open some files to "check" them to make sure they are good and work etc before you purchase. Yes all good signs so far

 

[Sebons]

Re: Old IDE HDD shows as "RAW" and wants to format partition

You know what, this is too much effort for not looking for anything specific. :smile:

I'm only looking at these old drives for fun, to see if there's anything peculiar or memorable there, and I was convinced that it was just a compatibility error between Win 7 and the old drive being acting as a master boot record.

The half(ish) hour scan did give me a handful of audio and image files, but it's not really worth it if this is the only method.

Thank you for your time, though!

Seb