cgsecurity.org

I'm not sure what happened but suddenly by 1TB external with literally my whole life on it suddenly stopped being recognizable in windows. In my looking around online I have downloaded and tried several recovery softwares. however - what I'm finding i that when I search for data it is finding all of the files that came "preinstalled" on the drive like the readme, the pdfs, the bitmaps that are their icons, etc. But none of my own data shows up. I think this means that I must have had more than one partition on here, but when doing recovery it can't seem to get to the one with all of my data on it. I would love if someone can walk me through some options and be patient with me. I have downloaded test disk and photo rec, but haven't seemed to be able to get through this corrupt partition table, or MBR, or whatever the heck the problem is. I have been given the name of some data recovery places to send my hard drive to, but I don't have the money they are asking for - and I don't really trust sending my hard drive with such personal information on it in the mail.

I have taken some screenshots of many of the steps i have attempted (including downloading parted magic and trying ddrescue which said there were 0 errors and 100%recovered) if it's helpful to add those, but didn't want to convolute with pics of things not related to testdisk or photorec. Please advise if you are willing!

Please provide
- a copy of the testdisk.log file content
- the list of your partitions before the problem. Do you remember the partition size, label, type ?

This is what my disk looks like in windows disk management. You can see that there is just one whole disk (raw?). And It only shows on the bottom not the top. As far as showing the log file contents what commands would you like me to run in testdisk. I tried photo rec but cant remember if I took screen shots of the test disk process.

Search for partitions using Analyse, Quick Search and if the partition is still missing, Deeper Search.