Boot disk is RAW format?

[drjones]

I'm posting this after the fact so I can learn; Friday I got calls from two different clients with computer problems.

The first PC booted past the splash screen, right to a blinking cursor with black scree. Ended up pulling the drive & connecting via USB to my laptop, only to discover it was in RAW format & prompted me to format the disk.

I was able to use PartedMagic to recover all documents, PST, etc. and my antivirus tripped a couple times while transferring the files, so obviously there were some threats in there. Could the viruses alone have done that to the disk?

Another client, same thing, except I think it was truly a failing drive and I was NOT able to recover any files, fortunately she's got a good, recent backup.

Anyway, I was poking around online & virtually all the stuff I found pertained to external USB drives becoming formatted as RAW - what would cause this to happen to your primary disk?

The causes I found are;

- Virus
- Failing hardware
- Sudden power failure

Anything else? Can you fix/repair a drive like this, or do you just do what I did which is to recover data (if possible) and replace it?

Thanks

 

[FremontPC]

Check the drive in "Disk Health" in Parted Magic. I believe it would be similar to the Disk Utility in Ubuntu. Is there a warning on the SMART report on the drive?

I haven't heard of malware that does this.

 

[drjones]

The first drive passed smart tests, both with HDDScan and within PartedMagic.

The second drive I'm pretty sure is toast; can't even mount it in PartedMagic.