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Bad boot sector and backup boot sector.

Posted: 04 Jan 2016, 23:01
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.

Re: Bad boot sector and backup boot sector.

Posted: 06 Jan 2016, 18:15
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..