cgsecurity.org

Hello all,

I have a 4TB drive, a wdc wd40ezrx-00speb0 that i use as a storage drive. it recently went RAW and most programs only find about 1800GB, which i suspect was the free space. i was following the instructions on the testdisk page, but the scan results were completely unlike the step by step. from what i understand, there might be a "boot sector" of the drive, and that tells the drive what it is, and that is corrupted and telling it it is unformatted? i know the data is there because data recovery software shows it during a scan, but i havent done anything-recovery or otherwise to the drive yet as i would like to learn how to fix this error.
i have run the scan and it waits for my next input-

When TestDisk starts, it lists the disk model. Does it list your sdc disk as "wdc wd40ezrx-00speb0" or something else ?
If it's the correct disk model, use WDC utilities to check the HPA (Host Protected Area) and DCO (Device Configuration Overlay) parameters (Under Linux or Mac OS X, hdparm can be used instead).
Do not try to "fix" the partition table or the filesystem until the disk capacity is correct.

it does list the model number, but the size is incorrect. i did try the WD utilities program, but it doesnt seem to recognize the drive at all.

You can try
- hdat2 disk utility
- or get Linux Fedora and create a LiveUSB and try hdparm
If it's too complicated or if it doesn't work, you should contact a data recovery company.

as opposed to testdisk?
ill try that out, thanks.
all i have on there is downloaded media, i can recover it or redownload it all easy enough, but i thought this would be a good time to leanr how to fix it should it happen to a more important drive.