Recovering files from 'RAW' file system?

Question

I am attempting to recover some orphaned picture files on a hard drive. This is a friend's computer and I really need to get these pictures back for her!!

The OS is Windows 7 Home Premium, and the file system is detected as RAW by Windows 7 (NTFS). The drive will not boot to the OS in the host machine and can obviously not be read by an NTFS file system. So I can not back up data from her OS to the cloud, I need to transfer disk to disk.

What happened is the file allocation table became corrupted. From a chkdsk log file I have found, the corruption originated about 4 months ago in the Pictures folder. At that time about 80 files in that folder were orphaned. I have attempted to use a handful of recovery tools with the drive connected through a SATA to USB adapter to a Windows 7 machine. So far, I have been able to recover everything except for anything from the Picture folder.

I believe I may be able to mount the drive in Debian and extract the data since it would not be dependent on the NTFS file system, but my Linux machine is waiting on a part, and is currently non operational. All I have at the moment is Windows 7, a Macbook Pro, and VMWare able to run Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora from Windows 7. I have yet to attempt to access the drive from the Mac, but will do so after I try a few more things.

Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I would make a copy of the drive, so you can test without risk of damaging the original.



You can look into things like testdisk, photorec, scalpel. If you do get a linux machine reading it, I would try photorec first, then scalpel, then testdisk, if you only need pictures.

Answer 2

A file system is the hierarchy of directories and files that is used to organize information on a computer. The use of file systems offers some important advantages for computers as compared with just using the HDD as a RAW disk. In particular, it provides a very intuitive means for organizing and finding files. Also, it provides a convenient means of hiding metadata that is of little interest to most users and would also be incomprehensible to most of them. iCare Data Recovery is able to help you retrieve files from RAW drive when its file system is raw instead of ntfs or fat32. It is easy to use without much technical knowledge.

Answer 3

Try running Recuva against it, both in the normal mode, then in the (cant remember the exact name) but there's an option to try to recover files from a failed/damaged drive too. Good luck

Answer 4

"All you need is to download an ISO image of Parted Magic software from here http://goo.gl/Qe15F , and then burn it to CD/DVD or USB Device.



Connect the problem drive directly to motherboard and boot the system using bootable device created using above steps. Once you at the desktop screen, choose 'File Manager' option to see all of your internally or externally connected drives and recover data from it.



Hope it helps. "