Re-initialized hard drive (as GPT) by mistake

Using TestDisk to repair the filesystem
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Author
eupak
Posts: 1
Joined: 23 Mar 2014, 21:17

Re-initialized hard drive (as GPT) by mistake

#1 Post by eupak »

Hi,

Sorry for the troubleshooting post but I seem to have made a mess of things and would sure appreciate some help.

I replaced a secondary hard drive with a new hard drive (NTFS I believe) and put the old one into an external USB enclosure in order to transfer the data to the new drive. I connected it and then went into disk management which prompted me to initialize my hard drive. Although I should have known better, it was a long day and I was very tired and it didn't register that it was asking me to initialize two hard drives and not one.

So I initialized the old hard drive with a lot of data (most of it without a backup) to GPT. In panic - and again, in poor judgement - I initialized the hard drive as MBT. And then back to GPT.

At this point, I forced myself to stop, take a deep breath and slap myself awake. Some nasty words were uttered. There was a awful lot of feet stomping.

I was referred to TestDisk which seems like an awesome tool. I think I generally know what to do (select IBM/PC then analyze then recover) but I don't want to make mistakes so I would greatly appreciate any help in terms of what I should do, what I should not do, and options I should stay the (beep) away from as I have no (beep) idea of what I'm doing.

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cgrenier
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Re: Re-initialized hard drive (as GPT) by mistake

#2 Post by cgrenier »

Yes, run TestDisk, select your disk, PC/Intel, Analyse, Quick Search... When your partition is found, try to list your files (select the partition and press 'p'). If it's ok, choose Write on the next screen.

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