Recover original partition after using Windows Disk Management
Posted: 27 Jun 2018, 16:22
Hi all, I could really use some help here.
We have a computer that dual boots Ubuntu and Windows. We had an external harddrive in there that was visible in Ubuntu. It is 8TB so I assume its partition table was GPT although I do not know for sure. Someone tried to access this drive from Windows recently. They went through the Disk Management utility and used the Initialize Disk menu to initialize a logical disk using the GPT option. Screen shot below is from another website showing the same situation but it is reflective of what was done here (the event wasn't recorded here). Now the disk reads as empty by both Windows and Ubuntu. The data on the disk was extremely sensitive and its extremely important that I figure out how to recover it.
I started a scan with testdisk. In the menu that offers a [Quick Search] the partition is recognized as being Microsoft Reserved. If I start the scan with the [Intel] option selected for the partition table type it shows the same Linux partition listed several times with the correct harddrive name. This does not make sense to me since an 8TB harddrive should have been using a GPT from the beginning and I understood that the [Intel] option searched for MBR partitions. If we run the scan using the [EFI GPT] option selected, then the partitions are found elsewhere and are labelled as MS Data.
How can I retreieve my original data??
We have a computer that dual boots Ubuntu and Windows. We had an external harddrive in there that was visible in Ubuntu. It is 8TB so I assume its partition table was GPT although I do not know for sure. Someone tried to access this drive from Windows recently. They went through the Disk Management utility and used the Initialize Disk menu to initialize a logical disk using the GPT option. Screen shot below is from another website showing the same situation but it is reflective of what was done here (the event wasn't recorded here). Now the disk reads as empty by both Windows and Ubuntu. The data on the disk was extremely sensitive and its extremely important that I figure out how to recover it.
I started a scan with testdisk. In the menu that offers a [Quick Search] the partition is recognized as being Microsoft Reserved. If I start the scan with the [Intel] option selected for the partition table type it shows the same Linux partition listed several times with the correct harddrive name. This does not make sense to me since an 8TB harddrive should have been using a GPT from the beginning and I understood that the [Intel] option searched for MBR partitions. If we run the scan using the [EFI GPT] option selected, then the partitions are found elsewhere and are labelled as MS Data.
How can I retreieve my original data??