Parameter not correct failure

[Ken Bowker]

I'm using Recuva Professional 153 2083 to recover  a WD usb hard backup drive which crashed during a backup This ppears in File Explorer as d :. I'm on Windows 11 vresion 22621.1702 running on an Asus X515MA laptop.Sometimes Recuva will see the drive immediately - sometimes, like now, it doesn't.  And that's when I get the incorrect parameter message. From previous experience I use a USB connector with a voltage boosterLooking at my screen, File Explorer can see rhe drive, Disk Manager can see it but Recuva cannot - its latest comedy message is that it can see D: but is "unable to detrmine the system type". I suspect this mean it's inRAW format (Disk Management agrees with this) which is why I turned to Recuva to do a high level format.

Can you save me from the psychiatrist's chair?

Ken

[nukecad]

You've made new backups to a working disc of course. (So the old backups are probably not so important now, but a few files might still be wanted).

The way that I've been able in the past to recover from an external HDD that had become RAW format (unplugged from USB without using 'Safely eject media' first) was:

1.  'Quick Format' the drive with Windows.
2. Recuva can then recognise the drive as one with a valid file table.
3. Use Recuva to search the newly formatted drive for non-deleted files, and restore them to another drive.

See also: https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048890271-Recovering-files-from-damaged-or-reformatted-disks-with-Recuva#recovering-files-from-damaged-or-reformatted-disks-with-recuva-0-0

As with any attempted recovery there's no guarantees, but it worked successfully for me* although a very small number of files were incomplete.
(Even then for those few partially recovered files I could usually display a partially recovered image in Irfanview with the rest blank, still read partial text files in Notepad, etc.)

PS, The crashed HDD I had was also a backup drive, copy/paste backups which meant that Recuval found multiple copies of the files because of course there were multiple backups of them on the drive,
Although I had selected 'Restore folder structure' on the Advanced tab Recuva couldn't recover the file structure for me,  (A RAW drive has no File Table).
So I used the Duplicate Finder in CCleaner to help speed up removing the multiple files.
Using the 'contents' filter in Duplicate finder so that it differentiated between different versions of the same file. (don't use 'Name' the copies will ahve different names with a  copy number).
It still took a while and of course, and even when I was down to 1 copy of each file they were still just a block of backup files with no file structure.
(You shouldn't have the same problem if the backups were images done with something like Macrium Reflect, each backup image should be one file and contain the structure within the image itself).
TBH I didn't bother sorting them any further and just left them as they were. I'd already made new backups with the file structure as it should be, so by far the majority of the the recovered files were not needed, just a few as backups for anything that had been previously modified or deleted.

*PPS. I've also successfully used that same 'Quick-format, recover non-deleted' method on a USB thumb drive which had also just been yanked out without 'Safely eject' and become RAW.