Mounting a "raw" filesystem that has information on it

[AlphaGhost]

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hello all,
i was wondering if there is a way to mount a "raw" filesystem? the device is a portable hdd, and my friend didnt format the hdd. so when i was examining it to the extent that windows lets me, it said that it was a raw filesystem. windows tells me to format the hdd, and linux tells me it doesnt reconize the filesystem. is there anyway i can mount it and get the data off so i can reformat the drive?

Thanks ya'll.

[rcgreen]

You can't mount it unless it has an intact file system
on it, a file system that is supported by the OS.
You can use the dd utility to copy it raw, if you
have a place big enough to put the data.

[AlphaGhost]

once i copy all the data, is there any tools i could use to extract the files and other information on there? then ill reformat the external hdd, and put those files back on NTFS.
ive heard of forensics tools, but i never looked into them. if there are any, do they come with any how-to's or detailed instructions? cause i do not really feel like tinkering around with this guy's files and messing them up.

thank ya again.

[Lostfarmer]

If the hdd was working and then MS Windows puts it as RAW, it is very possible "testdisk" will correct the problem. Be sure to read the How-TO use, you will need to run the options Advanced/recover boot record.
There are Dos, XP, linux versions of program.

TestDisk - CGSecurity

[i92guboj]

hello all,
i was wondering if there is a way to mount a "raw" filesystem? the device is a portable hdd, and my friend didnt format the hdd. so when i was examining it to the extent that windows lets me, it said that it was a raw filesystem. windows tells me to format the hdd, and linux tells me it doesnt reconize the filesystem. is there anyway i can mount it and get the data off so i can reformat the drive?

Thanks ya'll.

"raw" and "filesystems" are mutually exclusive.

And more than probably, unless your friend used some tool to dump stuff directly into a device (like rawrite or dd) the disk was formatted. Othewise, the OS wouldn't have been able to open the disk to put stuff in it.

So, I'd try testdisk as suggested above, to repair the partition table. No success can be guaranteed, of course.

[AlphaGhost]

Problem solved. the only thing i wasnt able to recover where his movies. pictures, music and documents i was able to recover. Testdisk worked just fine, but on windows and linux, thank you for showing me that.