Help with failed external drive Topic is solved

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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cbeat
Posts: 2
Joined: 18 Feb 2015, 20:14

Help with failed external drive

#1 Post by cbeat »

I'm having a problem with my 2 TB Western Digital external SATA HD. I dropped the drive and broke the case electrical supply, so I bought new enclosure and put the hard drive in that. Unfortunately, when I added the drive to my Windows 8 machine, Windows decided it would be a good time to force updates and shut down in the middle of driver install. When I tried to reinstall, Windows would not recognize the drive in 8, 7 or XP. I got the dreaded "You need to format the disk before you can use it"
So I ran TestDisk, and following the instruction at http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step, I let it select "intel" partition and analyzed the disk. It showed two FAT 16/32 partitions in the structure, but no files. I ran the deeper search and it finally showed the files in the primary partition. Following the instructions, I wrote the new partition structure and rebooted. Windows still would not recognize the disk, so I ran TestDisk again. But running TestDisk again, now TestDisk doesn't see the partition tables through quicksearch and deeper search. I built a Linux box to see if I could see the files on the Linux machine, but no dice. I'm kinda at my wits end. The data was there, and now I can't get at it any more

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cgrenier
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Re: Help with failed external drive

#2 Post by cgrenier »

Do you still have the testdisk.log file from the first run ?

cbeat
Posts: 2
Joined: 18 Feb 2015, 20:14

Re: Help with failed external drive

#3 Post by cbeat »

cgrenier wrote:Do you still have the testdisk.log file from the first run ?

Unfortunately, the attached log is the only one that I ran. I ran the first pass with "no log" from recommendations I found online

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