So I borrow this external HDD from a friend of mine. It's about 500 gigs of movies, music and the likes that I wanted to browse through and maybe copy one or two to my own computer. I insert the drive and I get a message telling me that I have to format the drive for it to work. Some quick googling and looking around in my computer tells me that the drive has for some reason become RAW. I figured it is because he has removed the HDD without safe removal (at least that is the only reason I can figure out) and the filetables are dead/gone/broken.
I can't format the drive as there are also photos and personal stuff on it that he does not want to lose. I downloaded some kind of recovery program (EASEUS) and ran it. It took a couple of hours but I was able to recover about 300 gigabytes of data. I happily move it to my own HDD and open the folder.
...
Wat.
It's one .AU file at 2.41gb, one Outlook file (.PST), tons of .swf files that I can open but they won't buffer or crash the program and finally a huge archive of .GZ files. They are labeled FILE001.GZ -> FILE043.GZ.
I google a little more and figure that .GZ is GZIP, some kind of compressing program. Since then I have sat and tried to figure out how to use it. I am not the most retarded person when it comes to computers but I almost never touch cmd (I run Windows 7 x64) and my programing skills are sub-sub-par.
So my questions are these.
1. Is there another way to save a HDD that has gone RAW?
2. How the hell do I decompress things in GZIP? There are no logical tutorials that I can find.
If this is not off-topic material I ask forgiveness from the mods. I rarely post on the escapist but thought this would probably be my best chance of getting a good answer.
EDIT: If there's some way of formating and then recovering the files I would be very glad as I can then hand him back the HDD in a working state
I can't format the drive as there are also photos and personal stuff on it that he does not want to lose. I downloaded some kind of recovery program (EASEUS) and ran it. It took a couple of hours but I was able to recover about 300 gigabytes of data. I happily move it to my own HDD and open the folder.
...
Wat.
It's one .AU file at 2.41gb, one Outlook file (.PST), tons of .swf files that I can open but they won't buffer or crash the program and finally a huge archive of .GZ files. They are labeled FILE001.GZ -> FILE043.GZ.
I google a little more and figure that .GZ is GZIP, some kind of compressing program. Since then I have sat and tried to figure out how to use it. I am not the most retarded person when it comes to computers but I almost never touch cmd (I run Windows 7 x64) and my programing skills are sub-sub-par.
So my questions are these.
1. Is there another way to save a HDD that has gone RAW?
2. How the hell do I decompress things in GZIP? There are no logical tutorials that I can find.
If this is not off-topic material I ask forgiveness from the mods. I rarely post on the escapist but thought this would probably be my best chance of getting a good answer.
EDIT: If there's some way of formating and then recovering the files I would be very glad as I can then hand him back the HDD in a working state