cgsecurity.org

Hi all,

I have been trying to use testdisk to recover a 3TB partition on a HDD. I have used TD several times before successfully I can't work out what i'm doing wrong.

The drive when bought originally was an external USB drive - I took it out of it's case and connected internally. When doing this I had to convert to GPT to enable me to use the full size of the disk - all no problems, this was over a year ago.

Today I took the drive back out and put it back into it's original USB enclosure however the drive came up as unallocated space on windows - I went back to the windows drive manager which prompted me to select either MBR or GPT- I chose GPT as I had done before but this has made no difference.

I loaded up Tesdisk to scan for previous partition (although I can confirm I have not formatted the drive!!).

Testdisk scan starts at 71% of the way through so doesn't seem to find the correct partition. Instead it finds the ooooold 2TB partition when I first connected the drive internally as mentioned above, however this was over a year ago! To try and get a different outcome I wrote the data to the drive so now it mounts as a 2tb (empty) drive, however this let testdisk scan the entire drive not the disk - this starts at 0% as expected and the only partition it finds can't be restored

If testdisk finds a partition during Quick Search, it'll jump to the end of the found partition and will keep scanning for more partitions till the end of the disk.
Through this behavior, testdisk can save a lot of time.
If you'd like to serach your entirely disk you should use Deeper Search instead.

Fiona