# URGENT! Fix File System from RAW back to NTFS



## phaedrus55 (Oct 2, 2007)

Hello everyone, i am in desperate need of help. I have come to be grateful for this website, because virtually every time i have a question or need help, i end up solving my problems thanks to everyone's help. That being said, i have a new problem that i've never encountered before, and from my googling of the problem, my prospects do not appear to be very good 

Just last night, i was having trouble deleting a very small folder from my desktop, the folder in question being measured in a handful of KB according to the vista deletion tool. Oh, and also, i was doing a permanent deletion (Shift + Del) not sending to the trash. Anyway, the folder failed to delete even after 10 minutes of waiting so i pulled up the task manager, stopped the process (which had, upon that very command, stopped responding) and my windows explorer restarted.

This has happened to me before, with Vista Home Premium, so i didn't think much of it, just thinking it's Vista being its occasional buggy self. Oh and i should probably mention that this was a folder created by the Cryostasis download utility that was provided to me by EVGA for registering my new GTX280. After several unsuccessful attempts to install Cryostasis i decided to turn off my pc for the night and get some sleep. Of course, Vista stayed on the shutting down screen for more than ten minutes, which is very rare for my pc, i've noticed that the only time it does that, it never shuts down and must be manually shut down. I've actually waited over an hour for this on a couple of occasions, and once a half hour, just to test my suspicions.

Today, upon booting up my pc windows decides to check the disks, something that i have not set it to regularly do, mainly because of the major increase in boot time. I was a little surprised but decided to let it run, figured i would come back after eating breakfast. However, as i was getting up to leave the boot up chkdsk utility suddenly stopped and my pc booted up as normal. Figuring that to be odd, i decided to log in, wait for the boot to finish, and pulled up the command console, and entered the chkdsk command and got the ominous message: "The type of file system is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives." 

At first, this message thoroughly confused me, i had no idea what a RAW disk was. Now i know, and i don't want to lose everything on the drive by reinstalling everything. It would take a long time, so now i need your help to find a way to recover the file system without reformatting, reinstalling, overall just losing programs and data. Also, i found out that it is only my C: drive, the Seagate 1TB HDD listed in my pc specs, that is RAW, because entering "chkdsk e:", which is my Maxtor 500GB listed in said specs, returned data about the drive, and my Samsung 320GB is not recognized by Windows because it is a Linux Ubuntu hard drive, in case of Windows failure as well as for the learning experience. Upon such discoveries, i have avoided writing anything to the drive (which is labeled as NTFS in the disk manager, and has no driver problems according to the device manager) and have not turned off or restarted the pc out of fear of further de-stabilization, etc.

Overall, im thoroughly confused by this, i hope my post hasn't rambled on too much and is concise enough for you to get the gist of things. I look forward to any such help provided and would like to thank everyone in advance for this much-needed help.


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## phaedrus55 (Oct 2, 2007)

bump


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## lawson_jl (Aug 3, 2008)

Your MFT/partition or entire drive is corrupted and needs to be repaired. It's pretty much certain that your drive is hosed at this point. It won't hurt to search for MFT and partition repair tools since the data on your drive is gone anyway so they can't make it worse. From you post I think your drive is failing. The problems you stated with deleteing files and shutting down issues are NOT Vista problems they are text book symptoms your hard drive is dying. You should run a drive diagnostic tool such as Seatools (from Seagate) to test the drive before reusing it.

In sort my suggestion is to reformat the drive and test it (if passes then use it) if it doesn't replace it. In any case make good back ups from here on out.


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## phaedrus55 (Oct 2, 2007)

Huh, i'll try that. I just bought this drive about a month ago, and Seagate's usually pretty good quality stuff, i really hope it's not going bad. As for the data being lost, it's not that bad, im running it right now, and normally it works fine. Plus i know it's not a virus cuz ESET Nod32 said no infected files after a complete pc scan. I'll look for that Seatools, or maybe my Maxblaster software will be able to check it out


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## lawson_jl (Aug 3, 2008)

You could certianly have bought a lemon drive. Rare theses day but it does happen. It's also possible a bad controller or bad RAM could cause the same issue. After you run the drive software it wouldn't hurt to test your RAM with memtest to be sure. Just to be sure that you don't have a hardware issue.


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## phaedrus55 (Oct 2, 2007)

Oh i hadn't thought of that, i'll definitely check with memtest too. So far the Seatools application hasn't found any problems, but i've only run short tests, i just started a long test. I might not post for a while, gonna have to run these tests before i post, except to acknowledge any further suggestions/recommendations, and thank you very much lawson_jl!


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## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

If you have your XP CD, run chkdsk C: /p from the Recovery Console. Type: "map" at the command prompt, too, to see what drives and partitions are listed.

Chances are that the partition table was damaged somehow (and the other problems you mentioned may be an infection, but could be a lot of other things, too). It can be restored.


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## phaedrus55 (Oct 2, 2007)

Well, Seatools has run for a while now, i had it do most of the tests on just the failing hdd. Every test except for the self tests passed, short and long versions. However, neither the short or long version of the hard drive self test seems to finish. I have left the long version running now since about 9:30 AM yesterday, and now it is 12:30 PM with about the same amount of progress as the short version after an hour.

Below is a picture i took and embedded for you to see how small the progress is, after so many hours after reaching that level. Also, sorry i couldn't screen capture, for some reason it's not working, so i had to use a camera lol 

Anyway i guess my main question now is does this verify that the drive is toast? If so would the best thing be to reformat or would i be better off RMA-ing the thing? I might still be within the time limit from newegg for that.


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## fairnooks (Oct 1, 2007)

See if anyone else has anything to say about data recovery for a bit yet, but if not, you could indeed try a full format as a further diagnostic. Since it seems SeaTools is bogged, there's a good chance the full format will bog as well, and if so, good reason with supporting evidence to RMA if possible.


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## phaedrus55 (Oct 2, 2007)

Ok, well, i've reformatted and re-installed Windows, and so far so good, dskchk works properly again. However, i decided to test with Seatools again and im having the same problem as before, all tests work and pass except for the drive self test, even the short one stops at the same point as in the picture above. Would that mean that, somehow, my drive isn't working right and is just gonna fail again in the near future?


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## fairnooks (Oct 1, 2007)

Well, its not confidence-inspiring for sure. I would think if there were a problem, SeaTools would time-out and report, and yet stalling would indicate that there is some sort of problem.

You could download another utility or two and look at the SMART info for the disk and see if there's a caution flag for temp or sector reallocation rate or any of that. CrystalDiskInfo (http://download.cnet.com/1770-20_4-...Name=platform=Windows&filter=platform=Windows) is one such utility.


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