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Failed Drive

Posted: 07 Sep 2012, 22:14
by jools
Hello all. I recently had the internal HDD (Seagate Momentus 320GB) in my laptop completely fail on me. It was working fine, then the machine froze, and upon restart the computer went repeatedly into Windows startup repair, which was unable to fix the problem. I have now removed the drive, and attached it via a SATA/USB docking station to my desktop PC, which is running Windows 7. The HDD comes up as M:, but shows as empty, and the drive properties show 0 free space 0 used space with a full pie chart
(no free space). In diskmgmt.msc it shows it as Raw. The drive has a second recovery partition which is 15GB, using Testdisk v 6.14 it will only show the recovery partition, and not the main one. I would really like to recover the data on this drive, so any help you could offer would be appreciated. Thanks.

Re: Failed Drive

Posted: 19 Sep 2012, 07:08
by cgrenier
If you run TestDisk and go in the Advanced menu, do you see your data partition ?

Re: Failed Drive

Posted: 24 Sep 2012, 17:51
by jools
Yes both partitions are there. I've attached a screenshot of the Advanced screen. If you let me know which way to proceed with testing through Testdisk I can also post a log. Thanks.
320GB.jpg
320GB.jpg (54.13 KiB) Viewed 5055 times

Re: Failed Drive

Posted: 04 Oct 2012, 06:08
by jools
Update. I attempted to perform a Quick Format through Windows, as I understand that I can re-write the filesystem while keeping the data recoverable, but it was unable to complete the format.

Re: Failed Drive

Posted: 13 Oct 2012, 17:34
by cgrenier
Reformating a partition erases data, so it's always a bad idea.
Try PhotoRec on the partition, you may still be able to recover some data.

Re: Failed Drive

Posted: 13 Oct 2012, 17:59
by jools
So you don't think that the drive can be saved by rebuilding the filesystem?

Re: Failed Drive

Posted: 29 Oct 2012, 13:25
by shawnwoods
I don't think any of the data you saved can be recovered now.