Partition table lost on WD My Book 4TB

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Author
micmon
Posts: 2
Joined: 26 May 2014, 12:04

Partition table lost on WD My Book 4TB

#1 Post by micmon »

Hi,

I bought a new external drive from WD (My Book 4TB). The short SMART test finished without any error.

I deleted all partitions and created a new GPT table as well as one large LUKS/ext4 volume. Here I ran into the first problem: gnome-disks did not let me create the volume using all available space (4001 GB) so I tried 4000 GB and it worked fine. I unmounted/mounted a number of times to make sure everything is fine and finally began transferring data to the drive. I unmounted and disconnected the drive and wanted to continue copying this morning. However, the disk now only shows "unallocated space".

The data I copied is not really critical (I still have most of it on another drive) but I would like to understand the problem. Any idea what could cause this mess?

In the case that TestDisk does not help (it is currently running but seems to take a long time), could anyone suggest further tools or tutorials to try?

micmon
Posts: 2
Joined: 26 May 2014, 12:04

Re: Partition table lost on WD My Book 4TB

#2 Post by micmon »

BIG update: looks like I approached this all wrong. Fact is, the partition was/is still there. It shows up in tools like fdisk but not in tools based on udisks it seems. Using the CLI commands, I was able to mount the partition sucessfully. Now I just need to find out why udisks does not see the partition...

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