Recovering files and folders can be more or less difficult when dealing with healthy or even corrupted partitions. In general, such partitions are still accessible via the OS, or at least they appear as drive letters in the file manager and in data recovery tools. However, there is a special case where one may not be able to see the drive letter at all. If this happens to a partition, then most probably it’s either corrupted beyond repair, features no file system at all (e.g. after repartitioning the disk) or is formatted with a foreign file system (e.g. you attempt to access an ext3 volume in Windows).

Such partitions generally appear as “raw”, or simply appear as unallocated disk space in the Windows Disk Management console.

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