Desperately Trying To Rescue Photos From External Drive

[Kidderman3]

Earlier this year, I finallly got round to gathering up all the digital family photos and videos going back a number of years. The photos were put onto an external hard drive and then copied onto a second HDD as a backup. The last time I viewed the photos from both external drives was around a month ago. I had no problems in accessing the content of either external drive using two Windows 10 PC’s. Being quite pleased to have got that far, I put the drives away ready for the next phase of the job, i.e. clearing out unwanted content, labelling photos and putting particular groups of photos into folders.

         Then disaster struck. I plugged one of the drives into a PC and was presented with an error message saying that the drive ( i ) 'is not accessible because it doesn't contain a recognised file system'.  The backup drive (F) is 'not accessible because the disk structure is corrupted and unreadable'. I also get a message saying that I need to format drive F before I can use it. Obviously, formatting the drive would wipe all content.  I've plugged both drives into three different Windows 10 PC's, with the same error messages appearing.

      I'm at a complete loss as to why this is happening. I've seen a considerable number of causes and solutions to this type of problem, but I'm concerned that without caution or  the correct advice, I'll lose all the content permanently. One thing which I have picked up is that in Disk Management, both the F and I drives are showing their file system as RAW as opposed to NTFS as other drives have.  Have I formatted the drives wrongly before adding content to them?  I'm hoping that there is a way in which I can retrieve the photos and videos from at least one of these drives. I'd be very grateful for any advice which may lead to a successful solution.

[Rustys]

You could see if Live Linux can read the disk.

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=15734&i=1

https://www.pendrivelinux.com/

How are you removing the drive from the computer?

[Bruce]

where were both drives being stored for both to get corrupted?
not next to a magnet or some sort of electrical interference???

and each drive will need a drive letter before any software can access the drive.
a quick format only kills the master file table so you lose where on the drive all the files (and their fragments) live, not the actual data itself.

but recovery programs like Recuva by Piriform have a real issue chasing down any fragmented file, to the point of it becoming impossible - it has no idea how many fragments a file may have or where on the drive they live. so yeah, even a quick format is bad enough.

[Kidderman3]

Hi Bruce, both drives were stored in a place where there would have been no magnetic or electrical interference. I’m not sure what you mean about each drive needing a drive letter. They each have a letter. Are you suggesting that I format the drives? My understanding is that formatting a drive will wipe it clean, which is what I’m trying to avoid. I see that there’s a reference to backing up. I did that by copying the content of the first drive to a second drive. what I can’t figure out is how both drives have become inaccessible at the same time but for different reasons. It sounds as if you’re advising against using a recovery program, which I won’t do. Thanks for your post.

[hackerballs]

https://www.diskinternals.com/partition-recovery/convert-raw-to-ntfs-in-2-steps/

might be helpful

[Bruce]

it is very weird that both went pear-shaped, together.
unless simply really bad lucky, or freaky coincidence, you’d have to blame environmental conditions.

by dive letter, I meant the drives would have to show up as F:\ or G:\ etc.
usually RAW has no drive letter assigned to it by the system.

as to recovery programs, in my experience, they take days and days to scan the drive, only to tell you it found a small percentage that can be recovered, and of those, most come back corrupted and unusable to boot.
but, that may be your last straw if other methods yield no results.

only a low-level format will erase all your data, a Quick Format will not, however, it will make data retrieval just that little bit harder. but in all honesty, I think you are looking into the blank void as it is!