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Hi all,

some days ago, my computer did not recognize my external 2.5'' 1tb HDD anymore. I checked, wether the HDD appears in disk management and there it said, that the HDD had to be initialized. So.. foolishly I initialized the disk with a GPT partition file system.

After that, the HDD was raw, the only partition together with all the data on it gone.

I think, my only hope here for recovering my data is TestDisk, so I downloaded the program and read a little into the documentation. But I am still not sure, of what I have to do.

I am pretty sure, that the partition system before the new initialization with GPT was MBR. But when I analyze the disk with the MBR setting, at least the quick search yields no partitions. Analyzing the disk with the GPT setting, results in TestDisk finding two Windows reserved partitions. None of them bootable. But as I said.. I am 90% sure, that the partition system before was MBR...

Photorec could recover some Data, but I stopped it, since the estimated time for checking the complete disk was about 400h and I still hope, that I can make the original partition bootable again. But for that I need your help. I am not experienced in data recovery and have almost no knowledge of HDD data architecture. Therefore I would be very thankful for any advice on how I can fix my HDD.

Thanks alot!

When testdisk lists partitons after quick search or deeper search, use 'p' to list the files from each partition.
This way, it's easier to know if you want to recover the partition or not.

Thank you for your reply!

Unfortunately neither quick search, nor deeper search found any partitions for MBR.

Is there anything else, I could try in order to repair the disk? Could it be a boot sector problem?

Thank you

P.S.
For EFI GPT, the search gives me back this:

No FAT, NTFS, ext2, JFS, Reiser, cramfs or XFS marker
1 P MS Reserved 34 32767 32734 [Microsoft reserved partition]
1 P MS Reserved 34 32767 32734 [Microsoft reserved partition]

But if these are partitions, I cannot do anything with them (show files or anything else).

If you don't get your old partition after Deeper Search, use PhotoRec...