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Old 12-05-2015, 11:07 AM   #1
Meelapo
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Default Hard Drive Recovery

I'm not very smart when it comes to hard drives so I could use some help. A month ago I purchased a used computer from Kijiji in order to act as my media server so that I could move all my DVDs and Blurays to the basement and just stream them. I ended up buying a Dell T3500 and then purchasing a 4TB hard drive.

When I installed the drive I had to update the BIOS and install some new Windows drivers but once I did the BIOS was able to see the full drive space and Windows recognized it too. Everything seemed okay.

I was happily archiving when a week ago I did a reboot of the server and when it came back up the Windows said the 4TB drive was in a RAW state and that it needed to be formatted. The drive was approximately 2.5-3TB full of data. I wasn't sure how to recover and I had maybe 25% of my stuff on my ripping machine (Mac) so I decided to start all over again.

Fast forward to last night and the same thing happened. Does anyone have any idea what the heck is going on? Is there something I'm doing wrong in terms of BIOS and/or operating system configuration? I'd like to use the large drive size but something is causing it to be recognized as RAW after a reboot.

Any help would be excellent!
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Old 12-07-2015, 08:54 AM   #2
Stealth22
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Hard to say for sure without seeing it in person, but I doubt its anything with the BIOS. Was the drive new when you bought it, or used?

Download a program like CrystalDiskMark or Hard Disk Sentinel, and run a health check on the hard drive. This isn't going to recover the drive or anything, but I'm curious as to why you had it happen twice in a row. I just want to see if the drive is on it's way out or not.

Don't format it yet...you still might be able to recover your data.
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Old 12-07-2015, 12:21 PM   #3
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Let us know the brand/model of the drive too. There was a fiasco a few years ago with older Seagate 1TB drives that would just fail. If you were able to update the firmware, the drive became accesible again (data intact). Might be something similar.

Also, I think Seagate and Western digital have diagnostic software specifically for their drives. Other manufacturers might have something similar.
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Old 12-07-2015, 01:03 PM   #4
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Sounds to me like you are hitting the 2TB limit. It will appear fine to the OS, but as you write beyond 2TB, it's going to do what you described. Did you set it up as a GPT partition? Oh, you will also need to format as NTFS and use a cluster size 1024 or larger.

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Old 12-09-2015, 09:14 AM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz View Post
Sounds to me like you are hitting the 2TB limit. It will appear fine to the OS, but as you write beyond 2TB, it's going to do what you described. Did you set it up as a GPT partition? Oh, you will also need to format as NTFS and use a cluster size 1024 or larger.
Fuzz wins this thread. I didn't even remember the 2TB partition limit. Isn't 4096 the default cluster size though? (That being said, it would still have to be setup as GPT...)

I'm not 100% sure, but I think there still might be a way to recover the data. Fuzz, you can correct me if I am wrong, but if Windows can't read the drive without formatting it, could OP use a bootable Linux CD or something to get at the data?
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Old 12-09-2015, 10:31 AM   #6
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I had a very similar issue not too long ago on a 4TB drive.

What happened with mine is it would work fine when booting up my machine, and I could access/run the files. Then at some point I couldn't run the files (could still see them though). I would get the same RAW format crap when trying to chkdsk.

A restart would temporarily fix it, then it would crap out again.
Luckily I had another drive I could transfer everything to in order to format the drive again. Since then it's worked fine.

I can't say for sure, but my gut tells me it was Windows 10 that screwed it up.
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Old 12-09-2015, 10:54 AM   #7
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Originally Posted by Stealth22 View Post
Fuzz wins this thread. I didn't even remember the 2TB partition limit. Isn't 4096 the default cluster size though? (That being said, it would still have to be setup as GPT...)

I'm not 100% sure, but I think there still might be a way to recover the data. Fuzz, you can correct me if I am wrong, but if Windows can't read the drive without formatting it, could OP use a bootable Linux CD or something to get at the data?
4096 should be default, but you can change it.

You could probably recover some of the data, but from what I understand, it hits 2TB, then just writes over the first part of the disk again, because it can't address the larger space. That's why you get corruption, and since the master file table is at the start of the disk, well adios MFT. So any data that hasn't been overwritten would be recoverable as individual files, but that can be a major PITA to sort out without an MFT. Been there.

And to Meelapo and everyone else, backups! Big drives are cheap, once you get this sorted, save yourself time in the future and backup.
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Old 12-11-2015, 05:50 PM   #8
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Personally had to use icubedev for my 3TB recovery. Cost about $1200 all in for recovery. After that, I have been using Backblaze for backups.
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Old 12-11-2015, 08:05 PM   #9
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You could partion it into two 2TB drives as well. Save you mucking about.
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