Attempted Partition Repair on External Drive, Drive Now Unrecognizable

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Artlaw1
Posts: 5
Joined: 10 Jun 2017, 22:27

Attempted Partition Repair on External Drive, Drive Now Unrecognizable

#1 Post by Artlaw1 »

Hi:

Been running a WD external drive with an EFI partition to use between a Mac and PC for photo storage and editing. Suddenly yesterday in a middle of a file save while connected to Windows 7 pc, the software stopped responding. Upon reboot, Windows said the drive was unformatted. I bought it home and connected it an iMac running High Sierra.

Both Disk Utility and Testdisk recognized the drive and the files/file structure appeared to be intact, although the drive was unmountable by the Mac. IT also showed some bad sectors. Testdisk showed two partitions, an EFI and MS Data, the latter is where the files appeared. After rewriting the EFI partition and rebooting, the drive is now undetectable by testdisk, the Mac disk utility, DDRescue, although it appears to spin up when I power it up in a BlackX caddy. I reran testdisk and I think the original log file was overwritten so I am relying on memory to describe the steps taken.

I think the drive is shot but am hoping for a recovery solution. Any help/ideas are appreciated.

Thanks,

Gene

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cgrenier
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Re: Attempted Partition Repair on External Drive, Drive Now Unrecognizable

#2 Post by cgrenier »

If the disk can't be seen by ddrescue, it's probably because the hardware problem is worst, ie stuck heads or damaged heads.
You should contact a data recovery company.

Artlaw1
Posts: 5
Joined: 10 Jun 2017, 22:27

Re: Attempted Partition Repair on External Drive, Drive Now Unrecognizable

#3 Post by Artlaw1 »

Thank you. It is being sent to disk recovery lab today.

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