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Windows 10 Drive shows as RAW

Posted: 26 Oct 2017, 16:30
by swin12
Laptop behavior:

When I try to boot, the Windows logo appears and blue screens shortly after citing: unmountable boot device

I have booted to a copy of Mini-Windows 10, where I am trying to run TestDisk. From mini-windows I can see the state of the disk as follows:

Current view of disk:

Disk Management:

Image

Diskpart:

Image

Volume 1 (D: Drive) is the volume I am trying to recover. As you can see, it is not listed as a disk (I'm assuming this is because diskpart can't work with RAW disks).

I take this as a Filesystem repair problem, as the file system type shows as RAW. Now, because of this... I don't seem to be able to use any Windows-based repair tools (I have attempted chkdsk, bootrec and automated windows repair, but with no luck).

TestDisk configuration:

TestDisk so far has gone as follows:

1. Launch TestDisk 7.1 as administrator and select drive D: as the media.
2. Partition type that TestDisk defaults to is None, so I select it.
3. I am brought to a screen showing a single partition labelled "P Unknown" spanning all disk sectors. From here I am offered "Type" "Image Creation" or "Quit". If I select NTFS as type it doesn't seem to make a difference, so I choose Quit.
4. From here I choose analyse and let the scan run for ~8 hours before getting no results.
5. I then run a deeper scan and also get no results.
NOTE: During the scans I can see "Read error at X/Y/Z (lba=####)" for every sector.

Requirements:

I hope to be able to recover files from the disk. To be able to boot to the disk would be a luxury. If I can recover the files, I will likely format the disk clear afterwards.

Any help is appreciated.

Re: Windows 10 Drive shows as RAW

Posted: 26 Oct 2017, 17:08
by cgrenier
Usually read error means there are bad sectors.
What is the result if you run "cmd" (right click run as administrator) and "chkdsk /f d: ?

Re: Windows 10 Drive shows as RAW

Posted: 26 Oct 2017, 17:14
by swin12
The type of file system is RAW

CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.

Re: Windows 10 Drive shows as RAW

Posted: 27 Oct 2017, 06:27
by cgrenier
Run TestDisk, select PhysicalDrive1, Advanced, select the partition corresponding to D:, Boot, RebuildBS, List.
If you can see your files, choose Write, confirm, Quit and restart your computer.
Otherwise if you still have error messages, you should clone your disk using ddrescue to a new empty disk as described in https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
Good luck

Re: Windows 10 Drive shows as RAW

Posted: 27 Oct 2017, 19:14
by swin12
Selecting Drive:

Image

Deafult Partition Type = None:

Image

Forced to select partition type because it is unknown (I choose NTFS):

Image

Rebuild BS Result:

Image

If I quit from this result and attempt to List files, I get: "Can't open filesystem. Filesystem seems damaged"

Re: Windows 10 Drive shows as RAW

Posted: 28 Oct 2017, 07:23
by cgrenier
diskpart shows volume that doesn't hold in the disks.
Can you boot from a Linux LiveUSB ? (see https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf)
Run the Linux version of testdisk and copy/paste the testdisk.log file.

Re: Windows 10 Drive shows as RAW

Posted: 30 Oct 2017, 15:50
by swin12
Here are the media selection options given (Fedora liveUSB). I do not see the disk or drive (should be ~256GB).

Image

Re: Windows 10 Drive shows as RAW

Posted: 01 Nov 2017, 08:03
by cgrenier
It's the same problem than from Windows.
Is there a disk not listed or listed with the wrong capacity ?

If a disk has the wrong capacity, try

Code: Select all

hdparm --dco-restore /dev/sdb

Re: Windows 10 Drive shows as RAW

Posted: 01 Nov 2017, 16:11
by swin12
Assuming I can rule out:

- /dev/mapper/x
- /dev/dm-x
- /dev/loopx

This leaves me with

- /dev/sda (I know this to be the 2nd physical disk in the laptop, showing correct size)
- /dev/sdb (this is the bootable Fedora media)

I would certainly say that the disk is not being listed. There is definitely something there though, else I wouldn't be able to see the partitions of that disk as shown in my original screenshots (from mini-windows disk management).

Any ideas why a disk might not be showing?