cgsecurity.org

Hi

I did the usual thing and disconnected my 1TB external drive from my Macbook without properly ejecting.

Now I get the dreaded "Initialise... / Ignore / Eject" message on Macbook, and on my Win 7 machine it immediately asks me if I want to reformat the drive.

Having heard about Disk Warrior miracle cures I tried this first but ZERO success. The drive seems to be formatted as NTFS, presumably for use with a Win 7 PC. (incidentally and also quite naturally this drive has all my important stuff on it and I don't have it backed up )

So I'm running testdisk, it's about 60% done as of time of writing, I have a message up which says:-

"check_FAT: can't read FAT boot sector
Invalid FAT boot sector
0 D FAT16 >32M .....(string of numbers)....
FAT16 >32M .......(identical string of numbers)....."

I'm guesing this means the structure of partitions is not okay and I'm going to have to rewrite whatever makes it boot.

Any advice on where I go from here (???) greatly appreciated.

Many thanks, it seems this is a good forum.

Run TestDisk, Advanced, select the partition and choose Boot, RebuildBS, List.
If you can see your files, choose Write, confirm and reboot
If it doesn't recover your data, try PhotoRec www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step