Help Restoring Hard Drive

Using TestDisk to repair the filesystem
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Korok
Posts: 2
Joined: 13 Jul 2018, 01:03

Help Restoring Hard Drive

#1 Post by Korok »

I have read many questions and answers in this forum and have been helped by them a lot but, still cannot restore this hard drive.

I have a WD Black 3T NTFS internal storage drive that is currently unreadable in Windows. The drive has a 2T NTFS partition on it and the rest of the space is unallocated. The drive suddenly showed up as RAW in 'My Computer' a few weeks ago.

Since I really don't know what I'm doing, I have made an image of the drive using ddrescue in Parted Magic and have restored the image to another drive which is what I am currently working with.

I have been trying to repair it for a couple weeks now and finally found the partition with Testdisk 7.1 by choosing 'None' at the Select Partition Type dialog. I am able to 'List' the contents of the drive and navigate through the directories. I tried to rebuild the Boot Sector and MFT.
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Now the drive doesn't show at all in 'My Computer' and Windows Disk Management shows it as having 4 partitions and 3 separate unallocated spaces, with no drive letters. When I right click on the drive in Disk Management, most of the choices are grayed out (I can choose Offline, Properties, and Help). When I right click on an unallocated space, the options are similar (I can choose New Simple Volume, Properties, and Help). Right clicking on any of the partitions only gives Delete Volume and Help. (I should add that it shows all 4 of these partitions as 'Healthy, Primary.) I am unable to assign drive letters and honestly, I don't think that would help since Windows is not seeing the correct partition.

I am able to copy files from the drive and I believe I have everything that's important but I would really like to restore it to functioning properly. I think it should be a simple fix to recover the drive, whether its the boot sector or mft or something else. Like I said, I really don't know what I'm doing.


Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks,
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3T-Part3.png
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cgrenier
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Re: Help Restoring Hard Drive

#2 Post by cgrenier »

As TestDisk has been able to list the files and say the boot sectors are ok, do not play with RebuildBS or RepairMFT.
I wonder why the NTFS filesystem is not inside a partition, you may have created a partition image and choosed to restore it as a disk image...
The best will be to create an EFI GPT partition table, create a partition, restore the filesystem image to this partition or copy the files back to this partition.

Korok
Posts: 2
Joined: 13 Jul 2018, 01:03

Re: Help Restoring Hard Drive

#3 Post by Korok »

As TestDisk has been able to list the files and say the boot sectors are ok, do not play with RebuildBS or RepairMFT.
Agree!
you may have created a partition image and choosed to restore it as a disk image...
That is very possible! I have never used Linux before and made the image by following instructions here --->
https://html5.litten.com/make-full-imag ... ree-tools/
I may have missed something or done something wrong. That got me thinking. Since I recovered my important files,
why not try messing with the original drive? So I disconnected the restored image drive and reconnected the original
and something weird happened. Windows recognized it like there was nothing wrong. I have access to everything again.
So I think I will wipe the restored image drive, reformat it, and copy the original to it.
3T-Ori.png
3T-Ori.png (21.08 KiB) Viewed 1895 times
Thanks for your help!

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