Need Advice/Help with Partition Recovery

[jhhaze]

Good Afternoon,

Background: I had a 3TB Seagate GoFlex Agent external hard drive full of media. I took off the enclosure and was going to use the 3TB hard drive in a new NAS (Western Digital ex4100) I purchased. I did not know at the time about the JBOD formatting needed for this NAS drive and incorrectly assumed that it would read my existing file type. As a result, I put the drive into the NAS and when it told me it needed to format my media drive to configure it, I canceled out properly and shut down the NAS properly, as well. I then removed the drive from the NAS; however, when I attached the drive to the original power supply and usb 3.0 adapter and plugged it into both mac os x and windows it was not able to see any partitions. In windows is shows the following two unallocated spaces (see pic below) and in os x it just asks to initialize the drive.

***Please note that at no time did I authorize or complete a format of this drive, so I'm hoping it is just a corrupt partition table or similar issue and I'm hoping to repair the partition rather than focus on file recovery strictly.

The hardest part that I have is I am not 100% certain of the files system I used and I've been reading but, don't have a 100% certain grasp of the technical terms regarding hard drives, volume, partition, etc. If I had to guess I probably formatted it to exfat in os x (which I now know is a big mistake), so that I could use the drive on both my PC and MAC. However, the drive could be HFS+ or NTFS, as well. I can't imagine I would have used any other file system.

Prior to finding testdisk, I used a trial of R-studio. Attached are some screen shots, in case they are helpful. However, I am more than willing to try out any instructions in Testdisk to first determine the format of my drive and then if we find that if we can repair the partition.

Thank you so much, in advance, for anyone willing to take time out of their day to attempt me to recover some previous files and photo memories. I would be happy to answer any questions or clarify anything that is confusing or run any other diagnostics in an attempt to recover my media.

Best Regards,

Jack

[Fiona]

Seagate claims something like preinstalled encryption and backup.
Did you use any encryption?
To avoid any doubts, would it be possible to run a diagnose building your disk back into its original enclosure?
Reason why I'm a little bit unsure, we´ve had already some cases (especially WD) with an build in encryption chip and it was not possible to access any data when the disk was removed out of the original enclosure.
Can you run a diagnose using TestDisk 7.1WIP 32bit?
Can you copy and paste the content of your testdisk.log into your next post?
Your disk is currently recognized as MBR-disk.
http://s16.postimg.org/obuey69tt/IMG_1298.jpg
If you watch your photo, convert to GPT means that you currently have no GPT disk but Intel MBR.
Intel-MBR only supports disks up to 2.2 TB.
There is an exception with advanced format on disks with 4K sectors.
In your disk managemant console, there are two areas with unallocated space.
Did you have two partition on your disk?
You can run a normal diagnose running Analyse, Quick Search and if nothing would be found, Deeper Search also.
Deeper Search searches additional to Quick Search for a backup of a boot sector or superblock.
Partitions will be displayed for recovery and at the bottom of the screen you'll get some info abot the boot sector/superblock and the file system.
Scanning large disks is very time consuming.
Partition table type Intel is a lot faster then on a GPT-Disk, because GPT scans each sector.
The diagnose is only intended to find your partition and if any partition would be found you can select it and press p to have a try to list your files.
Please let me know, did testdisk find any partitions, what file system was displayed at the bottom of the testdisk display and have you been able to list files?
Also you can use testdisk to copy your files to another not affected disk or partition.

Info about changing your disk to GPT etc.. will follow.
Currently it's not intended to make any changes to your disk.

Fiona