External Drive - Used as single partition - showing in TestDisk but not recovering
Posted: 17 Jul 2018, 13:26
Hi all,
I have a 4TB WD external drive that I was using as removeable storage. The whole drive was a partition. No further divisions. For some reason it stopped working due to some power issue. After getting the power issue worked out, when I reconnected I was unable to see my content. Currently it shows as below in the disk management.
Right now I have connected the drive through a SATA to USB2.0 connector. When I run testdisk on it, the drive shows up as a single drive along with my main drive from the laptop.
After searching for lost partitions, testdisk does find the old single partition and shows it as:
At this stage when I press "p" to have a look at the files, I can see it list all the files and folders perfectly fine. The whole drive and its contents are visible.
So I followed some steps from different forums/youtube and tried to get this drive running. After finding this lost partition, I pressed enter on the "Write" option to get this partition written and restarted the computer as per the instructions. But still the drive is not recovered and it still shows up as above in disk management.
Next I tried to change the type of the drive to logical and then restarted the computer after write command and now it shows the following when I "analyse":
Finally, I tried to rebuild the boot sector figuring maybe that is the problem. So I went into advanced options as per the testdisk guidelines and chose the rebuildBS command. Once it was complete I tried to view the files but it gave an error saying the file system is not right. I did not write the boot sector as the instructions only said to proceed if you can see files.
I am pretty sure I screwed up somewhere and that is why I have these multipe drives and sector errors showing up. The good thing is that the data is still intact and visible and browseable through testdisk.
Could someone guide me through the steps needed to just get this old partition active and get rid of all this duplicate information.
It would be a huge help!
Thanks everyone!
I have a 4TB WD external drive that I was using as removeable storage. The whole drive was a partition. No further divisions. For some reason it stopped working due to some power issue. After getting the power issue worked out, when I reconnected I was unable to see my content. Currently it shows as below in the disk management.
Right now I have connected the drive through a SATA to USB2.0 connector. When I run testdisk on it, the drive shows up as a single drive along with my main drive from the laptop.
After searching for lost partitions, testdisk does find the old single partition and shows it as:
At this stage when I press "p" to have a look at the files, I can see it list all the files and folders perfectly fine. The whole drive and its contents are visible.
So I followed some steps from different forums/youtube and tried to get this drive running. After finding this lost partition, I pressed enter on the "Write" option to get this partition written and restarted the computer as per the instructions. But still the drive is not recovered and it still shows up as above in disk management.
Next I tried to change the type of the drive to logical and then restarted the computer after write command and now it shows the following when I "analyse":
Finally, I tried to rebuild the boot sector figuring maybe that is the problem. So I went into advanced options as per the testdisk guidelines and chose the rebuildBS command. Once it was complete I tried to view the files but it gave an error saying the file system is not right. I did not write the boot sector as the instructions only said to proceed if you can see files.
I am pretty sure I screwed up somewhere and that is why I have these multipe drives and sector errors showing up. The good thing is that the data is still intact and visible and browseable through testdisk.
Could someone guide me through the steps needed to just get this old partition active and get rid of all this duplicate information.
It would be a huge help!
Thanks everyone!