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2TB WD External HDD Recovery

Posted: 08 Dec 2012, 23:13
by maziak
Hi there

I have a WD external 2TB harddrive which has some important data on it.
I lent it to a friend who - while copying some data - restarted his windows computer, forgetting the drive was still copying. Once restarted, he got the error popup that windows could not read the drive, asking if he wants to format it. It's strange that this happened with a manual restart of windows, but apparently he was using a file copy manager, which might be responsible for the drive not shutting down properly.

I have run TestDisk with the drive. I have tried initially with my Mac & now with a PC.
The partition is listed as MS Data
The main error I seem to get is :
Warning: number of heads/cylinder mismatches 0 (NTFS) != 255 (HD)
Warning: number of sectors per track mismatches 0 (NTFS) != 63 (HD)
(I've attached the testdisk.log file)

When selecting the partition & trying to list the files (using 'P') I get the error:
'Can't open filesystem. Filesystem seems damaged.'

Does someone have any idea what the problem might be & what the strategy would be to fix the issue?
Could I fix the index tables, or would I have to do a full recovery (which will take ages on 1.8TB worth of content)
Seems strange that such a serious seeming problem can occur from a manual windows restart while copying.

Thanks
Tracy