You have a crashed hard drive. You throw it in another machine as a slave and CHKDSK scans it and fixes a bunch of errors. But, when Windows starts, you see the drive with a red dot over it with a question mark in it. You can’t open the drive and when you look at the properties you see the File System type is RAW instead of NTFS.
You can use this free open-source utility to try to rewrite the partition table so that Windows will recognize the drive: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
- Unzip the file you downloaded and run testdisk_win.exe and the program will open in a CMD window.
- At the first window select “No Log” and press the <Enter> key.
- Select what drive to analyse, choose “Proceed” and <Enter>.
- Select partition type – Intel if it’s a PC.
- Select “Analyse” then <Enter>. The drive/partition will be analysed.
- Select “Proceed” at the next screen, then <Enter>.
- Press “Y” if the partitions were created under Vista – “N” if not.
- TestDisk should say “Structure OK”. Choose the drive/partition to fix. Then press <Enter>.
- Select “Write” and press <Enter>.
- Press “Y”.
- Press <Enter> and close TestDisk. Reboot the computer.
