Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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After PC crashed, windows says drive needs to be formatted

September 27th, 2023, 3:21

My PC blue screened while playing a steam game.
After I rebooted the PC, one of the hdd disappeared and when I go to disk management, it tells me disk0 needs to be formatted before it can be used.

What tools can I use to attempt to restore the NTFS volume that was on the disk before crash?
Let's assume the best case -- that a few sectors identifying the NTFS volume was overwritten.

I have a recent backup of that drive so it's not too tragic. But I want to take the opportunity to learn to recover the data.

OS: windows 10 64 bit

Re: After PC crashed, windows says drive needs to be formatt

September 27th, 2023, 4:57

I use DMDE for that sort of things. First make sure the drive's healthy (SMART) and be aware that doing in-place repairs is always risky.

Re: After PC crashed, windows says drive needs to be formatt

September 28th, 2023, 7:33

I had more than once success with https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Read the manual and be careful with every step. Having backup is a must! It's possible that the disk died in the exact moment and triggered the blue screen.

Re: After PC crashed, windows says drive needs to be formatt

September 28th, 2023, 16:18

mr44er wrote:I had more than once success with https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Try DMDE. I think you will find that it is much more capable and much easier to use than TestDisk.

Re: After PC crashed, windows says drive needs to be formatt

September 29th, 2023, 14:30

Thx, bookmarked and I will check it out.
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