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Nevermind; somehow after mucking with it a bit with test disk, running chkdsk /f seems to have recovered from the 2nd index at the end of the disk! Yay, I'm all set. Thanks for making this cool helpful tool.

Disk over 2 TB are usually using EFI GPT partition table. But disk using 4k sector can still use PC/Intel partition table.

There is a backup of the NTFS boot sector. It can be restored with TestDisk, Avanced, Boot.
There is also a backup of the MFT. It can be restored using Advanced, RepairMFT but ...

so... any suggestion on what my next step could be?

and here's the quick scan results for 'intel':

Drive W: - 5000 GB / 4657 GiB - CHS 76000 255 63

The harddisk (5000 GB / 4657 GiB) seems too small! (< 25 TB / 23 TiB)
Check the harddisk size: HD jumpers settings, BIOS detection...

The following partitions can't be recovered:
Partition Start End ...

Thanks very much for the reply. So I see that my 5TB disks are in fact 4096 sectors. So it sounds like it could be either EFI or Intel. How should I confirm? I assume it is important to have that correct before going to Advanced/ Boot?

If these drives were never used to boot up a system, but were ...

Hi Folks -

I had two 5TB Samsung drives. I shut down my Windows 8 laptop and swapped the two drives so that my photo drive could use the USB3 connection. Once I turned the laptop back on, nothing worked. Each drive thought it was the other one briefly, but no files could be accessed, no writes ...