Hard Drive Partition Gone RAW

[anthony_chri]

I lost a partition on my RAID 0. It was not the system partition, it was my games drive.

Anyone know of an easy way to recover the drive with out having to format?

[untrueparado]

that is one of the worst things that can happen to ur drive partition. u can probably use a live bootdisk with raid reconstructor on it and recover it. i usually use miniPE because its got almost everything, there might be better alternatives that im not aware of though. if its the raid card thats gone bad, try purchasing a new one. if its mobo, it probably went corrupt so chances are, you might not be able to recover it fully. even with raid reconstructors, it can only recover some files and most of them dont retain the file structure so i would just pick out the important documents and reformat the drive.

http://minipe.org/

[anthony_chri]

I think I will try downloading a partition recovery program.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...2E1681616925SF

[MrObvious]

Spinrite is the best hard drive utility on the market. I'm not saying this to sell it, but to state the obvious.

[anthony_chri]

I will try SpinRite tonight.

Additional Comment:

Ran SpinRite. Unfortunately, it does not recover partitions or files. It only fixed damaged drive sectors.

[MrObvious]

Well the drive may have been bad. If the RAID array is gone you may be crapped out.

[anthony_chri]

Well, there was no damage to the drives or the RAID. Both the boot partition and my compressed partition worked fine. I could boot, just could not use anything off of my games partition.

When I looked in the Vista Drive manager, it reported the partition as RAW.

I downloaded SpinRite and ran it. After 5 hours, it found no errors and made no repairs. That confirms that there was no damage to the drive.

I downloaded EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional. I was hoping to just rebuild/fix the Partition so it would just be there, but no dice. I had to recover all of the files to my storage partition. I think I got about 90% of the files off of the partition. I reformatted the partition and copied everything back on.

So far, all of my Steam games work, Crysis/Warhead, Stardock games work. Visual Studio works again. The only thing that was lost was Supreme Commander/Forged Alliance.

The only thing on the drive that really mattered was my save game for Far Cry 2 and I got that back. I could have accepted downloading all of the games over and reinstalling VS2008. If I would have lost my Far Cry 2 save game, I would have been REALLY mad. Of course, Steam Cloud is coming out this week.