Raptor 600 Gig Dynamic Invalid - Need to Convert

[Sneak]

Have a WD Raptor 600 drive that I took out of an old build and put in a newer one running Windows 7. It worked fine for about 2 years. I go on Vacation and come back to find the drive not showing up in My Computer. In Disk Management it showed as Disk 4 Dynamic Import Failed. To the right of that it shows no partition info. No idea why it showed Dynamic, this disk was never part of a RAID Array. No idea what happened there. A right click on the drive gave me no highlighted option to import the drive but properties said the drive was working. Device manager says it is working also. So I thought who knows, maybe a reboot will fix it. I did. Nothing in the bios said there was a drive problem. When it came back up Disk Management now says and has for a few: Disk 4 Dynamic Invalid. So I downloaded a copy of AOMEI. It says the disk is empty so I would not let it covert the drive to a Basic.

So now to my question: Of course I would like to save the data on the drive but if I try letting Windows 7 convert it to Basic the data is gone. So...what current program out there can I use to try and read this drive to see if there is anything on it? If nothing is on there I am really going to wonder WT?? happened.

Maybe the drive has just failed in some fashion.

 

[staticlag]

You want to start with making a bit for bit backup of the drive. You will need a drive of exactly equal or greater size and a *nix distribution to do this, use the "dd" command.

Next you can try gparted http://gparted.org/

or R-studio http://www.r-studio.com/

They should let you play around and try and recover your data if it is possible, since you made the backup you are free to try methods that might erase your data.

One thing I wouldn't try are windows autorecovery tools like scandisk, it will probably nuke your existing data.