I have a Western Digital 2 TB My Book that is USB 3. It is showing up as RAW in Disk Management. Windows Vista is telling me to format the drive. But this is not possible because I do not want to erase the data.
The External Hard-drive was hit by malware or has malfunctioned. I am trying to use Testdisk, but there is not too much help on their forum and the partition is showing up as Unknown even after deep scans.
Can you let me know what needs to happen and if there is anything Western Digital can do? I think this My Book needs data recovery or for the partition to be recognized so I can do data recovery.
First rough guess is that the malware or whatever damaged the partition table. Without that, it has no idea where any data is. There may be some software that can scan and see if it can find the other structures to help rebuild the table.
Another possibility is corruption. If the drive was not safely removed after data transfer to it, the partition can be corrupted. Or if power went off while transferring that same thing happens.
In any case, if files have been corrupted, you won’t be able to recover them. You can at least try Joe_S’s idea to see if you can get some files back before buying the software. That way it would be worth the cost.
As a last ditch idea is to run the command prompt to convert FAT to NTFS. Sometimes that fixes a Raw drive.
To convert a FAT partition to NTFS, perform the following steps.
1 Click Start, click Programs, and then click Command Prompt.
2 At the command prompt, type CONVERT [driveletter]: /FS:NTFS.
3 Convert.exe will attempt to convert the partition to NTFS.
Joe
I wish WD would admit there is an issue with these drives- been doing this job for years and the only externals I have had any issues with from my clients are WD- Seagate and the rest do not-
