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One old PC which my dad uses suddenly didn't boot into Windows XP. So I get HDDs from it and put them into external HDD box. One of them is shown in Explorer but can't access it, it shows message: You need to format the disk in drive before you can use it. In diskmgmt.msc it is displayed as RAW. I found that Testdisk should help me with. After both quick and deep scan it showed me this one partition: enter image description here

Then I pressed p to list all files in partition but it showed me this: enter image description here

I haven't found any solution for this yet. Has anybody any suggestion?

For the second disk: Explorer didn't show me it and diskmgmt.msc said that it is unallocated. I haven't work on it yet, I will also appreciate any suggestions to this problem too.

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  • I would run Spinrite on the drive.
    – Moab
    Feb 9, 2016 at 17:22
  • Before running Spinrite (great tool BTW) be sure to check your SMART stats. If the disk is approaching a failed state, you are better off using DDRescue to get an image off it before all is lost. Last time I ran spinrite on a damaged disk, it spent its last gasps trying to fix random bits on the disk surface, and as a result I could not get the disk to function sufficiently to perform any further recovery tasks like imaging it to healfthy media. SpinRite does have a utility for reading SMART data.
    – Frank Thomas
    Feb 9, 2016 at 17:32
  • @FrankThomas I checked SMART data in HDtune and it says it is OK, I doesn't understand it deeply but it just showed that state is OK. Now I run surface scan to know if disk is OK. now I'm somewhere in half and everything is fine. I didn't understood what spinrite do, I don't want to get data from disc, I want it working or look into it, get important data, format it and clean install new system.
    – Gondil
    Feb 9, 2016 at 17:40
  • ok, it sounds like spinrite is exactly what you want. it will reenforce the magnetic signal of every bit on your disk. I only bring up data recovery, because if the disk is failing, it might lose its partition the way you described.
    – Frank Thomas
    Feb 9, 2016 at 17:48
  • So is anywhere any tutorial for Spinrite? If I understood you it has many functions and one of it (don't know yet whitch of them) is suitable for me to bring my disk filesystem back to NTFS. As I see I have to make bootable USB and run it when starting pc, then let it run on connected HDD.
    – Gondil
    Feb 9, 2016 at 17:54

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The reason of all failed attempts to get back lost partitions was RAID - on 2 disks were made 2 partitions but one partition was on both disks. Let say, I have two 200GB disks and partition C: of size 20GB is on disk 1 and partition D: of size 380GB is partly on disk 1 (180GB) and partly on disk 2 (200GB).

I found out this by placing disks back to PC and run Ububtu from USB. I made this also on my laptop but partitions still weren't accessible because of connection through 2 external HDD boxes (seems this option doesn't merge martition right).

So that's reason why I can't access disks when connect using external hdd box and also reason that any of recovery and partitioning and whatever software wasn't successfull.

Edification: Know things that you work with :)

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