Recover NTFS created via external case with 4k emulation

Using TestDisk to repair the filesystem
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Author
martintk
Posts: 1
Joined: 20 Dec 2015, 19:12

Recover NTFS created via external case with 4k emulation

#1 Post by martintk »

I bought an Intenso 3TB external drive a while ago, formatted as NTFS.

Then, the controller died and I am now trying to get the data using another, older enclosure - the drive itself seems ok, but the problem is that the controller apparently did a 4kB sector emulation (i.e. the drive has 512B sectors, but the controller translates this to 4kB sectors and exposes this to the OS to get around the 2.2 TB limitation) - something that the other enclosure does not do, so I see 512B sectors now, so the partition table points to the wrong location.

I did try to get this working with testdisk - testdisk does find the partition with the correct size, but does give a warning about the sector size:

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Warning: number of bytes per sector mismatches 4096 (NTFS) != 512 (HD)
Reading the files on it just triggers an error ("Can't open filesystem. Filesystem seems damaged.")

I did manage to replace the MBR with a GPT table that should now be correct for 512B sectors, but I still get the same errors about the file system.

Is there any way to get around the sector size problem and at least read the files on the disk, without having to get another enclosure that does 4k emulation?

Any help is appreciated.

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Disk /dev/sdb - 3000 GB / 2794 GiB - CHS 364801 255 63
Current partition structure:
     Partition                  Start        End    Size in sectors

	 
	 Warning: number of bytes per sector mismatches 4096 (NTFS) != 512 (HD)
 1 P MS Data                     2048 5860511999 5860509952 [MediaHDD]

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