cannot see errors when running testdisk - but drive not booting and not visible in an enclosure

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
hardya
Posts: 3
Joined: 18 Feb 2014, 18:39

cannot see errors when running testdisk - but drive not booting and not visible in an enclosure

#1 Post by hardya »

I have a Toshiba Satellite L850D-12P Laptop with a HDD Hitachi HTS547575A9E384(S1).

The drive won't boot in the laptop.

If I remove the drive to an enclosure, as an external drive on another machine (Sony Vaio VGN-NW20EF) drivers automatically successfully install, but the drive cannot be seen at all and strangely at the point of removal of the drive the OS requests the drive to be formatted.

With the drive back in the laptop, booting to Linux, with gpparted magic, if I run testdisk it shows the partition is "EFI GPT" partition type. This seems consistent with the default settings in the Laptop's Insyde H20 Setup Utility (BIOS Kind of) as Boot Mode = UEIF.

In testdisk I select "analyse", no obvious errors seem to be listed, if I hit "quick search" and testdisk appears to hang. If on another attempt I go into "advanced" and into "boot" for each item where "boot" is an option, the boot and backup boot are both listed as OK and as no different from each other.

Can anyone suggest any further checks I could do with testdisk or other linux tools that might show up why the drive will not boot and why it cannot be seen in a USB enclosure?
I am not ruling out of course that there are issues with the toshiba harware, but the failure in the usb enclosure is a little evidence towards there being "something" wring with the drive. That enclosure route has often shown up other drives in the past with the same hardware and process.

Locked