My cat decided to play with 1 of my drives. It hit the floor and is showing as Raw. Although File Explorer says the parameter is incorrect, it assigns a drive letter but WD Quick Formatter does not see it as a WD drive. Disk Manager reports the capacity of my other 4T drive as 3725.99 GB, it reports the capacity of my damaged one as 465.75 GB. I have Recover My Files 5 and have formatted drives before and recovered the data. If I let Windows 10 format this drive will it format to full capacity or will it format to a smaller size and lose my ability to recover the data? Is there another utility that will format to the full 4T capacity?
Thanks
It may be physically damaged by the fall.
Joe
It did blow out one of the pcbs. I removed that and hooked it up to a universal usb cable and power cord. I have had this happen before on smaller drives and reformatted and recovered the data. Didn’t really trust the drives after that but did get my data. I’m concerned about whether Windows will format it correctly. Chkdsk doesn’t work on Raw drives. I am hoping that there is a WD utility to initialize the drive so that I can format it to the right capacity. Thanks
When the hard drive is powered on, does it emit a “clicking” sound or a harsh grinding noise?
Please do not format this drive. If you do, Windows will likely format it using an incorrect file system. Try running the CrystalDiskInfo utility to read the hard drive’s SMART data. You may also try using specialized software to repair the RAW drive.
If the data on the hard drive cannot be recovered, you must immediately disconnect the drive and send it to a professional data recovery laboratory. Only they possess the capability to open the drive in a cleanroom environment, physically replace damaged read/write heads, and perform stabilization procedures to extract your files.
Read this guide further- How to Fix RAW External Hard Drive without Formatting & Recover Files?
