750 gb gpt drive initialized

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Cotutor
Posts: 3
Joined: 25 Oct 2013, 14:43

750 gb gpt drive initialized

#1 Post by Cotutor »

Asus laptop with Windows 7 Home Prem.
Drive got infected with FBI, unable to boot to windows PE or safe mode, backed up essential data, but the drive was setup as GPT instead of MBR.
In order to view the contents and backup I put the drive in my drop in external enclosure and plugged it into my Windows 7 desktop. This caused Win 7 on the desktop to require initialization, which I did.
After this the system wanted to format, which I DID NOT.
I then put the system in my xp box and ran get data back and was able to recover the documents and such that I had on the drive.
Then I ran the test disk after some searching around for a solution in google. I managed to find the partitions, and write them back, but when i put the disk in the laptop and try to boot it tells me that Windows failed to start and to insert my system disk.
I tried inserting a Win 7 Home Premium DVD w/SP1, but it tells me the O/S doesn't match.
Not sure where to proceed from here or if you can help me, but I hate to reload the full system, was hoping to run recovery because the laptop came with software that i don't have discs for to reinstall.
Not sure what other information would be helpful but don't want to fill this post with something that's not useful to you, so just tell me what you need.
Thank you in advance.

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Fiona
Posts: 2835
Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 17:19
Location: Ludwigsburg/Stuttgart - Germany

Re: 750 gb gpt drive initialized

#2 Post by Fiona »

Laptops, Notebooks often come without any media.
There is often a hd recovery partition available were you can create recovery media to restore your system back to factory settings.
Did you try to reinstall windows or did you try to repair windows startup using the option windows repair from your CD?

Fiona

Cotutor
Posts: 3
Joined: 25 Oct 2013, 14:43

Re: 750 gb gpt drive initialized

#3 Post by Cotutor »

Fiona,
Thank you for taking the time to try and help me with this.
Fiona wrote:Laptops, Notebooks often come without any media.
There is often a hd recovery partition available were you can create recovery media to restore your system back to factory settings.
The recovery media was not created unfortunately. But there is a recovery partition on the hard drive.
Fiona wrote: Did you try to reinstall windows or did you try to repair windows startup using the option windows repair from your CD?
Fiona
Yes, and when i try to use the repair option I get an error
The version of system recovery options is not compatible with the version you are trying to repair...
I've used both a Win 7 HP with and without SP1. Got the same message.
I have not tried to reinstall, because I was hoping to access the recovery partition built into the hard drive, as I'm sure there is software that came preinstalled that i would like to recover.

Edit:
Fiona I thought if I gave you some more info it might be helpful.
As I said in my OP, I did initialize the drive, but did NOT format it.
But after this, failing to access my info I ran the TestDisk 6.14, and upon startup it asked me to choose the partition table type. it defaulted to Intel, but knowing the disk was originally setup at GPT I chose EFI GPT.
This seemed to work, it was able to find 3 partitions,
[system] [os] & [recovery]
but they all show up as P MS Data
I wasn't sure what to change here, so I didn't mess with a whole lot. I did go into the advanced and tried to rebuild the boot, but even though that didn't give any errors, I'm still unable to boot to the drive.

Oh and this is an ASUS laptop, and trying to use F9 to access the recovery fails. F8 does not work either.

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