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.
Bad boot sector and backup boot sector.
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
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
Re: Bad boot sector and backup boot sector.
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..
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..