cgsecurity.org

Hi guys - I hope you can help me solve a problem with my External HD.

I have a 1TB Bufflao HD which is nearly full (931 Mb)

It has a power lead and USB connector

It does not appear in the My Computer directory list, but I can see it in Control Panel/.../Disc Management. It shows as Healthy (Unknown Partition) but has no directory letter (e.g H:\) and I am unable to allocate one in the options menu. The only option available is Delete Partition which I am reluctant to do.

I have tried TestDisk 7.0 (thanks!) and ran the fist few steps. as follows:
Create new log file
Select disk form menu (it appears in the list OK)
Intel
Analyse

It says Bad Relative Sector. No Partition is Bootable.

I don't know what that means, or what to do next. Is there any way I can recover the data on the disk?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

BCFCdave

Use Quick Search and Deeper Search if needed.
It's explained in https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf

Thanks for this, I will have a read and give it a go. May need to ask more questions later ! One step at a time

I tried both Quick and Deeper Search but neither identified a partition

It recognises the disk OK - it says 1000 Gb / 931 Gb - CHS 121601 255 63

But nothing more.

What should I do next?

Thanks

Try PhotoRec. Does it recover your files ?

I ran PhotoRec overnight, it only recovered a few small .mp3 files (2 KB). So that has not worked unfortunately. Is there anything else I can do?

Thanks

Do you have the possibility to remove the disk from its USB case and connect it directly via SATA ?
I think there is a hardware problem. If you can't connect the disk via sata or if the recovered data are still useless, you should contact a data recovery company.

I had another look at the recovery folder and there are some other files in there :

.tib (175 Gb)
.dbx (275 Gb)
.fs (200 Mb)
.ab (1Gb)

So it may have saved something. Is there a way to read these files?
Thanks
Dave