cgsecurity.org

Hi,

Just a quick question before I begin my attempt at recovering my ext HDD. When I first bought my (3TB) HDD I formatted it to FAT32, and I never partitioned it at all, it was just a "complete disk"
I'm following James Litten's advice: http://html5.litten.com/how-to-fix-exte ... ecame-raw/

BUT, like Mr Litten and other websites (including the TestDisk Wiki page), the examples used are when disks contain multiple partitions.

My question is, considering I have only got one partition (the disk itself), when I do a "QUICK SEARCH" in TestDisc and it finds my drive (I press "P" and I can see all my files), should I then continue with the table recovery as per mentioned on the Litten page? Or is my problem not a partition issue, is it a file system issue and should I be doing something else to fix it?

Cheers in advance, and happy to provide more info if needed

Just a quick update. I decided to go ahead and try it, but when I chose the "write" option, it comes up as saying "write error".

I tried again this morning, and I took screen shots from within Ubuntu, and saved them to my harddrive, but then I couldn't access them when I booted from windows.

Any suggestions?

Can you try TestDisk 7.0-WIP and tell me if you still have the problem ?
It contains a fix for disks with 4096 bytes sector.

Hi Christophe.

I tried the TD 7 version. I first installed the 64bit version, as my PC is 64bit, but everytime I tried opening it, the application crashed. So I downloaded the standard version, which opened fine. However, although I could "write" the table, it is still inaccessible. In fact, I think it has made it worse (?) Here is what happened.

When I used the TD 7 version which you suggested, upon TD startup there were 4 disks available, whereas on the TD 6 version, there was only 3 (the one on the bottom was the additional one in version TD 7). (Screenshot 1)

Ignoring the bottom option, I tried writing on both the second and third from top options. But when selecting either of them the message "no bootable partition" comes up (screen 2).

I did the "analyse" option for both, and like previous TD versions, I could see my files. So I decided to "write". (before I did this, I checked that both boot sectors are identical, and they are).

On the first try, (2nd from the top), there was no problem with the write. But after rebooting, my HDD still didnt recognize it.

However, when I did this on the 3rd from top option, the result after the "write" is completely different. I restarted my computer and the Error message from Screenshot 3 came up. And then when I went in to the properties of the drive (screenshot 4) there is absolutely nothing.

Do you think I should just copy the files onto a new HDD and then reformat this one?

here is screenshot 1
the drives which show up on TD when it opens

Run "cmd" (Right-click Run as Administrator) and type "chkdsk /f d:". Does it fix the problem ?
What is the output of the command otherwise ?

Christophe

PS: The win64 archive should be fixed now.

Hi Cristophe,

Many thanks for your continuing support to this thread.

I ran CMD but it did not fix anything.
The result is:
"The type of the file system is exFAT
Volume serial number is 3C2A-CB59"

I think Im just going to wait til I get a Mac and transfer the files through TD onto a new HDD, and then reformat this one.

Also, I downloaded the update Win7 64b version, but it still crashed when I tried opening it. I think my computer is killing off all those who try to help it

Thanks again for all of your help