Unreadable Hard Drive Partition

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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MrEff
Posts: 1
Joined: 24 Mar 2018, 12:47

Unreadable Hard Drive Partition

#1 Post by MrEff »

A couple of days ago one of my hard drives stopped being recognised in Windows. It was still recognised in the bios so the actual drive appeared fine and after a bit of investigation I figured that it was the drives partition table that was the problem.

So I downloaded TestDisk and ran it to see if it could do anything. At the time it detected the drive and I could see that the files were still on there so it did indeed look like it was the partition table. I then used TestDisk to recover the faulty partition, which seemed successful.

However it just seems to have made things worse. Now the hard drive is only detectable in the bios and no longer appears anywhere in the system, TestDisk or any partition software.

So what did TestDisk actually do and is there anyway to undo whatever damage it did?

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cgrenier
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Re: Unreadable Hard Drive Partition

#2 Post by cgrenier »

A disk should only "disappear" if there is a physical problem/damage.
If your disk is listed in your BIOS, it should be listed by testdisk and other data recovery utilities at least as PhysicalDrive.

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