Friday 13 March 2015

[Trick] Fixing External Hard Disk Drive and Recover data

My very first personal External Hard Disk Drive of 500 GB that I won at a competition, abruptly decided to change its' format into RAW, refusing to give me access to the drive. I pretty much choked on this fact because I hadn't kept any kind of backup of this drive and wasn't ready to give up on the contents this drive had and its' esthetic value. A lot of searching on numerous websites led me to find enormous ways to reformat the disk partition into NTFS. However, I soon realized that instead of the diskpart measure to totally format the disk, chkdsk did a better job in analyzing the disk and recovering it into its' previous state. The recovery follows three simple steps.

Step 1: Open your disk management window

First <Windows Key> + R, then open diskmgmt.msc


Step 2: Analyse the File Systems and the Partitions

Here you need to see which file system needs to be rectified. In this partition, you can format, rename, change drive letters and paths, explore, and play around with all the partitions easily.
My hard disk here is the H: partition that brilliantly changed its' file system format to RAW, causing me a lot of inconvenience.



Step 3: CHKDSK

Chkdsk is available only when you open your DOS prompt in Administrator mode. To do this, you can open your windows explorer, go to
file>open command prompt> Open Command Prompt as administrator
Now when the window opens up, quickly type in

chkdsk /f <desired drive letter>

And that is it. Your hard work (actually my hard work at 2 am) is complete. Drum Roll........... *Ba Dum Tuss*