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Noob here that needs some help.

Posted: 11 Dec 2012, 08:13
by sevan
Hello All

My name is Sevan

About 4 days ago I had my external WD My Book Essential external HDD go out. Here is what happened, I have all my Photography images, CR2, Jpeg, PSD Tiff and so on along with my Lightroom catalogs and back ups on the drive. It was not showing up in my computer, so I thought it was the USB3 driver on my Mobo, so I uninstalled and re-installed it and it worked for a few days then it went out again. Then the following day the drive showed up and I thought it was all good. The next day the drive didn't show up at all even in the disk manager, and when I put my ear next to the drive when I powered it up I heard the drive sound funny. SO I opened up the enclosure removed the drive and hooked it up to a sata 6gb slot and Disk Manager found it but it said it was unallocated!

Now I have run R-Studio and it found a root drive with a bunch of folders like 3D XML FIle / AVR Sound / BMF Image and a bunch of other folders that I never had on the drive.

Then I found testdisk, It has been running for 24hours now and it is 58% in and three ines poped on the screen saying this.

check_FAT: Bad jump in FAT partition
unknown 659927289 52116685418744 52116025491456 [^WM-8Cea^G]
MS Data 834391855 22755565492366309 22755564657974454
check_FAT: Bad jump in FAT partition
check_FAT: Bad number of sectors per cluster
unknown 1186630218 4977411680275017 4977410493644800 [P= 0

What could be wrong with the drive? I accidentally allocated the drive but I DOD NOT format it and now it shows up in my computer but i can not open it with out formatting it. I think the drive might be salvageable. What do you guys think?

Thanks in advance.

Sevan

Re: Noob here that needs some help.

Posted: 11 Dec 2012, 10:40
by dragonfly41
My first thought before making any attempt to recover files would be to "clone" the disk image and then work on recovering files from the cloned disk image. This requires you to buy a duplicate hdd.

Re: Noob here that needs some help.

Posted: 11 Dec 2012, 16:17
by sevan
I already have a internal HDD 2tb ready. But Acronis see the WD20EARS but says FS: Non Partition 0X6 (FAT16). When I select it as a source disk in the next step for Destination Disk all my HDD are grayed out and are not selectable. How else could you clove it?

Re: Noob here that needs some help.

Posted: 11 Dec 2012, 17:24
by dragonfly41
My next guess is to try restoring partition table in the hdd ..

either use TestDisk or if you are more comfortable with a GUI try ..

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

free software.

And separately .. have you tried photorec?

Re: Noob here that needs some help.

Posted: 12 Dec 2012, 06:41
by sevan
dragonfly41 wrote:My next guess is to try restoring partition table in the hdd ..

either use TestDisk or if you are more comfortable with a GUI try ..

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

free software.

And separately .. have you tried photorec?
No I have not yet tried Photorec. Maybe I should try that before I try to fix the partition table? Is there a tut on Testdisk partiotin table fix? Or do you think partition tool is a better bet?

Also Testdisk finished scanning

Image

I pressed enter and now it says A; Add partition
L: Load Backup
T: Change type

Or should I simply close the window and try to fix the partition table first.

Sevan

Re: Noob here that needs some help.

Posted: 12 Dec 2012, 12:52
by dragonfly41
I don't think you can expect to get a reply from the main testdisk team until you can post the testdisk log file after Analyse. And add more information about your environment to avoid guessing.

You appear to be in windows (/dev/sda?) with an external drive under test (/dev/sdb?)

In windows you are using testdisk version 6.13 but the latest is version 6.14 which you might download.

You might also try burning a Live Linux CD to examine your file system from Live CD session. My personal choice is Ubuntu 12.04 Live CD but there are other distros you can burn to CD or USB.

Photorec does not change any properties of your /dev/sdb drive so it is worth trying. However make sure first before starting that you have enough space in your main drive for copying recovered files.

One problem with photorec is you will not be able to recover file names or the hierarchy.

Depending on how valuable your data is you might have to consider using other recovery programs either in Live CD or in Windows. You can always try these first before committing. i.e. you may see your files for recovery but you won't be able to recover them until you buy a licence. But at least this points to the fact that if you can learn how to use testdisk you should be able to recover your files.