Portable Hard Drive Crash
Posted: 14 Apr 2012, 16:06
Away on business my portable hard drive crashed - which is frustrating since it not only contains some "Work In Progress" but also the back ups of two other (Windows) machines I used to own.
The drive (500 MB Toshiba) was originally partitioned with two partitions (and a remaining unused area). The first, small partition, is still visible in Windows but the main partition, containing my work, is unreadable and Windows keeps prompting me to format it (which I won't do until I have exhausted all avenues). Using the Disk Managment widget in the Administrator Tools (Vista), I can see that Windows thinks the drive is RAW but it is (and was always) NTFS - ironically conert i: /fs:ntfs also reports that the filesystem is NTFS and doesn't do anything.
I have worked my way through some of the options with TestDisk and I've failed to recover anywhing becasue it reports that the filesystem is damaged - even after I try and repair the Boot Sector, I wasn sucessfull in updating the MBR.
I've attached the log file in the hope that someone there can spot the obvious error that I've overlooked and can help me recover my data (for which I will make a donation to charity).
One final note (which may or may not be noteworthy) - while attaching the ZIP to this posting I noticed that the smaller partition on this disk (E:) is now full (never used to be).
Andrew (aka CyberDude).
The drive (500 MB Toshiba) was originally partitioned with two partitions (and a remaining unused area). The first, small partition, is still visible in Windows but the main partition, containing my work, is unreadable and Windows keeps prompting me to format it (which I won't do until I have exhausted all avenues). Using the Disk Managment widget in the Administrator Tools (Vista), I can see that Windows thinks the drive is RAW but it is (and was always) NTFS - ironically conert i: /fs:ntfs also reports that the filesystem is NTFS and doesn't do anything.
I have worked my way through some of the options with TestDisk and I've failed to recover anywhing becasue it reports that the filesystem is damaged - even after I try and repair the Boot Sector, I wasn sucessfull in updating the MBR.
I've attached the log file in the hope that someone there can spot the obvious error that I've overlooked and can help me recover my data (for which I will make a donation to charity).
One final note (which may or may not be noteworthy) - while attaching the ZIP to this posting I noticed that the smaller partition on this disk (E:) is now full (never used to be).
Andrew (aka CyberDude).