cgsecurity.org

I have a Seagate 1.5T external hard drive that is failing and shows the filesystem as RAW (unallocated) in Windows. The drive is spinning and not making any ominous noises. I live in hope that I will be able to recover the files from this drive.

I am currently running Testdisk. I tried Intel mode, but it did not find any partitions and gave me a read error. I repeated using "none" for partitions and have been able to get to the point where testdisk is creating an image of the drive. As of 6am this morning, it has been running for approximately 36 hours and is only 9.6% complete. The image.dd file on the destination drive (not the damaged one) shows 0k. How long should it take to create the image file?

I have tried to use other cloning software unsuccessfully. Errors report that the drive is unreadable. SMART data is not available. It fails both the long and short tests with SeaTools for Windows. I have tried to look at the drive with various tools, but I receive messages that tell me that Sector 0 cannot be read, that there are bad sectors.

I am still uncertain as to whether or not I have partition damage or file damage or physical damage. I do suspect that its current status is the result of not using safe removal, but I am unsure of this, because the drive was powered down before it was transferred from one system to another.

There is data on this drive that I would like to retreive. Do I have to accept that this drive is beyond recovery? Or is there someone on this forum that can help me?

I have not formatted or written to the disk. I have not tried to use CHKDSK.

I have read this forum extensively and have not found a definitive answer to my situation. If I have missed something, I would appreciate someone sharing the links for me to read.

Thank you, the moderators and members of this forum, for helping me.

Nadine H

Running test software in the disk is not a good idea.
I had a look a the Seagate download pages. I did not like
much the look of them. Furthermore, I could not download
any of their software, even when clicked in the "I Accept" button and had to authorize
all sort of third parties to run cookies or God knows what. In the end I gave
up. I have got a Seagate HDD, but I would not run their software, not if they cannot
programme without MS .Net Framework (any version). Whatever happened to C or Assembly?


Have a read through this general guide

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

This bit might be more interesting

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk ... e_recovery


To clone your disk, you could try and run Gnu ddrescue as described here:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk

Either boot from Knoppix as described in that page,

http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp. ... pub/linux/

Check the list of packages/programmes and the language of the download beforehand.
The CD 7.05 version now includes Gnu ddrescue as well as the DVD.

Fedora Security Spin is an alternative

http://spins.fedoraproject.org/security/#downloads

The Direct download, 32-bit PC Edition, most likely for compatibility.

Best of luck

Just as it's already mentioned in the previous post, you shouldn't run TestDisk from any affected partition or disk.
Would it be possible to upload a screen shot from testdisk "Analyse" (current partition structur) ?
It's your partition table and current situation.
Often when partitions appear as RAW, users have the possibility to make a boot sector diagnose and if it's possible to repair the boot sector, your data will be available again.
But to decide a boot sector diagnose, your partition in your partition table must be correct.
That's why a screen shot is appreciated.
If you'd like to, you can open your testdisk.log in your testdisk folder and open it using something like wordpad and copy and paste the content into your next post.

Fiona