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Hi there, issue is exactly what the title says..

3TB drive NTFS (GPT) was probably not unmounted correctly under OSX - which ended up corrupting the whole partition (this has happened several times in the past, but not so critically).

Through Testdisk I was able to identify partition, but :

1. telling me it's exFAT instead of NTFS (?)
2. The whole drive was one large partition - Testdisk shows me 3 partitions (!)
3. I could list files on 2nd partition - Testdisk wrote filetable, but a large number of files/directories seem corrupt (maybe because remaining files were split to 3rd partition?)

I am wondering. Is it possible to forcibly rewrite the whole drive as one partition (and as NTFS)?
Or is there anything else I could try? Kind of desperate here..

Regards P

Hi, I can't offer you a solution as I am in the same position as you. I have NTFS drives which have become unformatted after being booted into osx. It happened twice, which is too often to be a coincidence. Which version of osx were you using? I'm on 10.11.4, but the first time it happened I was on 10.10.5. I assume you're using a utility to enable writing to NTFS under mac os? Which utility were you using? I use Paragon, but at the time of both incidents I was on a slightly older version than the latest I wondered if that may have contributed to it. I have since upgraded to the latest version but I am retiscent to start the mac with the ntfs drives attached. Also are you using a genuine mac or a hackintosh? Mine is a hackintosh. I managed to recover files using a different utility before I learned of testdisk, and now I'm running testdisk on the drive but it is a little outwith my understanding. I'm learning as I go.

I also get the drive appearing as several partitions when it should have only been one. I hope you find a solution for yours, and for now can only offer solidarity.

Rick

Hey Rick, thx for ur support man. No help but, at least someone replied

It seemed strange no one hadn't suffered this faith before me (and ended up here). Yea lesson learnt the hard way.. OSX does not mix well with NTFS !

I used El Cap and unlocked NTFS support within it, used ML before that with Paragon as well. No difference in the level of improvement during these years..

You should not use any (permanent) NTFS disks unless you are completely sure they're being properly unmounted (which you can't be sure of). Yea hackintosh here too - but no more, not worth the risks and suffering under poor disk cross-compatibility..

Now, the best thing you could do is to clone your faulty drive before trying anything else (I bought an identical drive) and use the new drive to try different methods of recovery without risking changes to the original drive. I wish someone here with more knowledge could chime in with some idea as to why there appears to be multiple partitions and how to put them back into one single partition.. Can this be forced with entering specific sector values for example?

Hang in there buddy.. P