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Seagate Expansion Desktop Board died, "Disk seems too small"

Posted: 10 Jan 2018, 01:28
by Vortas
Hi there,

today my external Disk somehow died. Well it was a Seagate Expansion Desktop ( old model ). 3 TB. I think the USB 3.0 board died. Well... It doesn't react to anything so it is dead. Second one now. So I've put the harddisk out of the housing and put another USB adapter on which I am using.

Windows told me the Harddisk needs to be formatted. Looking into the control panel showed me a 375GB RAW partition and two "empty" partitions on the harddisk. The harddisk was a single partition with 3TB.

After reading a bit I threw Testdisk on it.
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Partition is found. Drive seems too small... Well it IS a 3TB drive... But why 375GB? Damaged? And there is that byte per sector missmatch... The drive was formatted like it came out of the store.

To verify that it isn't my spare adapter, I disassembled my newer 4TB Expansion from Seagate and used the port inside of this one. Same result.

So what can I do to match drive size to the actual partition and at least get my stuff off it. The funny part is that those 375GB could match the free and unused diskspace I had left.

Oh it is btw a ST3000DM001.


It's not my most important data... But would be nice to get it back running.

Re: Seagate Expansion Desktop Board died, "Disk seems too small"

Posted: 10 Jan 2018, 12:03
by cgrenier
You are actually searching for partitions inside your partition E:, it's useless.
Try what is described in "Repairing filesystem" from https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
Good luck

Re: Seagate Expansion Desktop Board died, "Disk seems too small"

Posted: 10 Jan 2018, 14:11
by Vortas
Oh... Just got my mistake... I have chosen E: instead of PhysicalDrive 1. My Bad. Would never checked the lines above it without searching my mistake because of your comment. ^^ Reconstruction is running... We will see what happens.
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Re: Seagate Expansion Desktop Board died, "Disk seems too small"

Posted: 10 Jan 2018, 15:47
by Vortas
• start testdisk
• select the device containing the partition (avoid drive letter like D:)
• confirm the partition table type
• go in the Advanced menu
• select the NTFS partition
• choose Boot
• select RebuildBS


Result:
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Does that mean my Data is dead?