cgsecurity.org

Hello,

I was attempting to install OpenELEC (a media center operating system) and accidentally installed it to my external hard drive. It has now wiped a completely full 3 terabyte external hard drive.

I have followed all the instructions I have seen on the internet and cannot get past the 'harddisk seems too small!' error.

Testdisk is trying to tell me my 3TB hard drive is actually 32TB.

This is my hdd: http://desktop-external-hard-drive-revi ... eview.html (but a 3tb version)

Please help me, I want to restore the files so I can give my family a 3tb media center for xmas so they'll never need to watch tv again.

TestDisk only displays a mesage that your disk is too small, because it found that large partitions and they end after disk limit, that's why they're not recoverable.
But it's only a message and has no significance, because TestDisk can find partitions on the basis of remnants.
Important are the results.
Please let me know your OS, how many partitions did you have on your disk and the partition type or file system like FAT32, NTFS etc..
How ist your disk listed in your disk managemaent console, because it must be GPT for partitions bigger than 2.2 TB.
Also, repeat your diagnsose and copy and paste the content of your testdisk.log.
You'll find it in your testdisk folder.

Fiona

Hello Fiona,

Thank you for your amazingly fast response.

On the Disk Management screen the 'volume' column is empty for the drive. The file system is also empty. I was told by a workmate that NTFS was the typical default for windows external hard drives.

The partitions currently are: 1.90GB Healthy (Active, Primary Partition), 2792.50GB Healthy (Primary Partition) and 125MB Unallocated. I never partitioned the disk myself so if the above partitions are not a default for the disk, OpenELEC must have partitioned it for me to that.

My current Operating System is Windows 7.

It takes me ~8 hours to run the analyze command on my hard drive due to its size so will attempt to post back the log tomorrow.

I did not realize that the file system must be GPT for partitions bigger than 2.2TB (could you tell me how I could have found this out myself?)

Information from your disk management console and some information from Analyse might be ok for the first.
If your partitions are still in your partition table and your boot sector is damaged, it might be an idea only to diagnose your boot sector.
Can accelerate your diagnose drastically.


Fiona

Under the EFI GPT File System option, choosing Advanced provides the message "No partition available".

Under the Intel File System option, choosing advanced provides two partitions:

1 * Linux 0 4 5 30 253 31 497664[System]
2 P Linux 30 253 32 45598 29 63 732035840[Storage]

I changed the type of the first partition to NTFS:

1 * hid. HPFS/NTFS 0 4 5 30 253 31 497664[System]

Then chose Boot which would not work giving the message:

Boot sector
Status: Bad

Backup boot sector
Status: Bad

Sectors are not identical

A valid NTFS Boot sector must be present in order to access any data; even if the partition is not bootable.

Unfortunately I am not sure where to go from here