Is a drive still viable if there is no partition table?
Posted: 29 Nov 2013, 22:29
I booted up my machine last week and found no data on the SSD (the drive, bought reconditioned, is only a few months old). Booting a copy of Parted Magic (off Hirem's Recovery CD), I tried probing it and came up with nothing.
Since I couldn't find anything mounting the SSD in an external enclosure, I re-imaged it from an old file, back when the disk only had one Windows8 partition -- dd if=/usb_drive/old_disk.img of=/dev/sda
Rebooting now ends up at the blinking-cursor-of-waiting, so back to Parted Magic I go. Running testdisk (6.12), I must select a partition table type of "None"!
The data can be read under Analyse. The geometry is CHS 9730/255/63 with a sector size of 512. Disk SDA is correctly listed as 80 GB/74 GiB.
Running a deeper search, all these errors show up -- bad root cluster, unusual media descriptor, bad number of entries in root dir, incorrect number of heads/cylinder (FAT) !=255, incorrect number of sectors per track (FAT) !=63 -- but on the quick scan, the structure is OK.
Under Advanced:
-the type of the drive is correct (NTFS)
Under boot sector:
-Boot sector status is OK
-can't read backup boot sector (ntfs_boot_sector)
-can't overwrite NTFS backup boot sector
-if I try to rebuild BS, extrapolated BS and current BS mismatch
If I restart testdisk and select the drive's partition type as Intel:
-under Advanced the partition is split between bootable (P) Sys=72 and a hidden (*) Sys=6C.
-under Analyse, (P) Sys=72 is the current partition structure and (*) Sys=6C is under bad relative sector.
--there is a space conflict between the two partitions
I get similar results when I use testdisk 6.14. Why can I see (and recover) the data under a partition table of "None" and, like the topic asks, is this SSD still viable?
Since I couldn't find anything mounting the SSD in an external enclosure, I re-imaged it from an old file, back when the disk only had one Windows8 partition -- dd if=/usb_drive/old_disk.img of=/dev/sda
Rebooting now ends up at the blinking-cursor-of-waiting, so back to Parted Magic I go. Running testdisk (6.12), I must select a partition table type of "None"!
The data can be read under Analyse. The geometry is CHS 9730/255/63 with a sector size of 512. Disk SDA is correctly listed as 80 GB/74 GiB.
Running a deeper search, all these errors show up -- bad root cluster, unusual media descriptor, bad number of entries in root dir, incorrect number of heads/cylinder (FAT) !=255, incorrect number of sectors per track (FAT) !=63 -- but on the quick scan, the structure is OK.
Under Advanced:
-the type of the drive is correct (NTFS)
Under boot sector:
-Boot sector status is OK
-can't read backup boot sector (ntfs_boot_sector)
-can't overwrite NTFS backup boot sector
-if I try to rebuild BS, extrapolated BS and current BS mismatch
If I restart testdisk and select the drive's partition type as Intel:
-under Advanced the partition is split between bootable (P) Sys=72 and a hidden (*) Sys=6C.
-under Analyse, (P) Sys=72 is the current partition structure and (*) Sys=6C is under bad relative sector.
--there is a space conflict between the two partitions
I get similar results when I use testdisk 6.14. Why can I see (and recover) the data under a partition table of "None" and, like the topic asks, is this SSD still viable?