Bad boot sector and backup boot sector.

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
Forum rules
When asking for technical support:
- Search for posts on the same topic before posting a new question.
- Give clear, specific information in the title of your post.
- Include as many details as you can, MOST POSTS WILL GET ONLY ONE OR TWO ANSWERS.
- Post a follow up with a "Thank you" or "This worked!"
- When you learn something, use that knowledge to HELP ANOTHER USER LATER.
Before posting, please read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
Locked
Message
Author
Jdanc
Posts: 1
Joined: 04 Jan 2016, 22:30

Bad boot sector and backup boot sector.

#1 Post by Jdanc »

Good evening, I'll go over my issue in full detail.

December 31st, 2015 I was looking for a specific file. It was a specific archive that I had made that included one photo, one PSD, A folder with several more photos, and a few renders I was in the progress of making. I figure I had stores it one my external that I commonly keep in my hotswap. Despite a thorough check, twice by hand and once by the windows search function, I didn't find it. Then I decided to check my dreaded second eternal. I've had a long history with my second external being a pain in my rear.

I plugged in my second external, and as I had expected, it defaulted to the RAW file type. Not the first time it had happened, so I did what I did last time; use Find and Mount to find the partition. After a night of going out to dinner and celebrating the new year, I came back to nothing. Figured I'd try testdisk because that's always been my second go-to program to recover partitions.

January 1st-3rd was spent scanning "/dev/sdc" my 500gb Maxtor One Touch using TestDisk's Analyse to find the error. I had scanned it several times, and always came back saying "Bad starting sector, no partitions bootable." Attempted to use Advanced>Boot, and apparently both the boot sector, and backup boot sector are bad. I have considered doing "Rebuild BS," but as I am very worried about my data, I would like to not write to it at all.

Notes: I can back all the way out to the very beginning, after the screen that asks if I would like to log any data, and it does indeed show all three "Disk /dev/sd_." A, B, and C are there, along with all three of my drives, C, D, F. All three disks and their two options do label the disk's size correctly.

Edit on January 5th: I have forgot to add that I did have BitLocker enabled on the drive; as I do with all my drives except for my primary HDD. Although I know this might, and will make an impact—I hope I'll still be able to recover my data.

Alien
Posts: 4
Joined: 02 Jan 2016, 23:51

Re: Bad boot sector and backup boot sector.

#2 Post by Alien »

It kind of sounds like your second external has a fault SATA-cable or something?

Anyway, about "Bad starting sector, no partitions bootable". I assume that your external drive doesn't contain a host operating system in which case you should not care about the boot sector? You do care about the partition table.
I suggest you make a sector-by-sector clone of your disk, and experiment on that. You can use something like "EaseUS Todo Backup" to clone a disk.
I'm not too familiar with BitLocker, so cannot help you there..

Locked