Old "Football" hard drive "chkdsk is not available for RAW drives"

C

carsick

New Member
Hello,

I have a 1.6(?)gb drive, Western digital Caviar 21200, manufactured Aug 1996. I had Windows 95 or 98 installed on it at the time it crashed. I recently learned that there is software that might be able to recover files from this drive so I pulled it out of storage to try my luck.

The only files I need from this are xls file for my Fantasy Football Stats from 1999, the year I was in charge of stats. We have yet to pay out the winners cuz the drive went inoperative literally at the last minute. (The scoring system was absolutely crazy so recreation is one huge undertaking). I'd like to get this taken care before one of us dies of old age.

When I plug it into my computer system (Vista) I can "see" it when I open windows explorer, but when I click on it I get "you need to format the disk in drive f: before you can use it"

When I run chkdsk on it I get "The type of the file system is Raw. Chkdsk is not available for Raw drives."

I've run about a dozen free recovery software programs on it with no success. A couple of them did try to scan the drive (heard it spin up and clicking) but eventually hung with out showing any file or folder listings.

Several years ago I heard that perhaps its the controller card, so I was able to pick up a batch of 5 of these drives off of ebay for cheap. After swapping all 5, still no luck.

Bringing it to a professional would consume the entire pot (approx $500) so kinda hoping for small miracle here.

All thoughts would be greatly appreciated. TIA.
 
Well, a RAW drive is one that is unformatted. It has no type of file system on it, hence Checkdisk/Windows can't do anything until it's formatted. How did it go inoperative in the first place? How/where was it stored for all these years?
 
Thx for the reply.

Not sure I can recall exactly, but I believe I got the blue screen of death. After that incident it wouldn't boot up.

Storage has been in my basement in a box. Cool and dry year round.
 
Well, you may want to search for a few more free recovery tools and try them. I'm not certain which ones you used, but the more popular free ones tend to do a fairly decent job. However, considering the Drive's age, it has failed before, and going years without being used, it's possible that a professional recovery will be the only way. Whether or not that will be worth it (not certain how much would be left over) is up to you.
 
Thx again, any software recommendations for me?

I've used: Recuva, PC INSPECTOR File Recovery, Panda Recovery, TOKIWA DataRecovery, SoftPerfect File Recovery, Undelete Plus, FreeUndelete, ADRC Data Recovery Software Tools, Glary Undelete, Avira UnErase Personal, Recover my Files, and Recovery Manager by VAIOSoft.
 
Well, I was gonna suggest Panda, but oh well :P McAfee makes one, I think, if you have access to their Security Suite.
 
Reformat?

Just had a thought. What would happen if I did a quick format?

Some of these softwares say they can pull files off of a formated drive. Just seem like they can't handle the fact that the boot sector information is missing or scrambled.
 
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