So lost, please help!

[Tessel]

I was experiencing issues BSOD on my C drive during boot, repair, and safe mode. I was finally able to fix my system through a combination of chkdisk(which found and repaired errors in the C drive) and memtest which found errors but after cleaning and reseating the modules it cycled with no errors. However the problem started when I then saw my D drive which was a two 4TB disk mirrored RAID 1 using the GIgabyte SATA 2 controller was showing in windows as two identical but separate drives. Between my inexperience and exhaustion I made the mistake of going back into the BIOS, saw the peripheral setting was reverted back to IDE so set it to RAID/IDE and then Ctrl+G at boot to re-setup the RAID. Then in windows the RAID disk was not visible at all so I went into diskmgmt and it prompted me to select GPT or MBR and I selected GPT. It then prompted me to format the disk but luckily I said no. So I'm trying to use Testdisk to unFUBAR my disk from my noob mistake(I know I should have backed up the disk when the RAID fell apart or rebuilt it using new blank drives).

In diskmgmt the D disk now appears as RAW, do I need to be trying to recover the file system or recover the partition? Not sure I understand the distinction. The DMDE program shows a small EFI partition and then the ~4TB data partition labeled NFTS with all the folders as I expected, but the partition has a red x through it in DMDE.

I followed the Testdisk instructions and for partition table type I chose "EFI GPT" but should I have chosen "INTEL"? It is an Intel processor Windows 7 PC but I think it was GPT so wasn't which was the correct choice.

I ran the scan and it's been running for like 7-8 hours now but it's only at like 7 percent, I feel like at this rate it will take a couple days to finish. Is this normal on a 4tb partition or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks!

[cgrenier]

EFI GPT is the correct choice for disk over 2 TB (PC Intel can also be used if there are 4096-byte sector).
If D: is listed as RAW, there should be no need to search for partitions as your partition is already listed.
Instead run TestDisk, Advanced, Boot, RebuildBS, List. If you can see your files, choose Write, confirm, Quit

[Tessel]

Thanks for the prompt response! Is the full volume partition that shows up in diskmgmt as RAW definitely the original partition or is it possible that when I went into diskmgmt and it prompted me to select GPT or MBR and I selected GPT it created a new full volume RAW partition?

What you wrote makes sense but I'm just hesitant to cancel the testdisk scan to go into advanced at this point because after really crawling in the beginning it jumped ~30% in three hours and after two days it's finally to 76%. If you could let me know your thoughts it would be appreciated, otherwise I might just let the scan finish(hopefully by tomorrow) to get a full log file then try the bootsector rebuild from advanced as you suggested.

[Tessel]

The scan finished this morning, and I guess the algorithm found a bunch of extraneous "partitions" it couldn't resolve. I went ahead and restored the boot sector from the copy and it fixed the problem.

Thanks for the help!