External drive suddenly unallocated

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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slave1
Posts: 2
Joined: 24 Apr 2012, 19:42

External drive suddenly unallocated

#1 Post by slave1 »

Hi all,

Yesterday I took my external drive to a colleague, who is on MAC. His computer wouldn't recognize my drive so we wrapped things up and I came back home. When I plugged it in the drive was now unallocated. I've tried many recovery programs but none gave a satisfactory result.

Then I found Testdisk and gave it a go this morning. It's analysis is finished and please take a look a the jpeg attached. Now, I am pretty sure this drive was in NTFS, what should be my next step?

Thanks
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User avatar
Fiona
Posts: 2835
Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 17:19
Location: Ludwigsburg/Stuttgart - Germany

Re: External drive suddenly unallocated

#2 Post by Fiona »

I am pretty sure this drive was in NTFS, what should be my next step?
That FAT32-partition starts somewhere in the middle of your disk.
At this screen, just press enter and run Deeper Search to have a try to find your NTFS-Partition.

Fiona

slave1
Posts: 2
Joined: 24 Apr 2012, 19:42

Re: External drive suddenly unallocated

#3 Post by slave1 »

Hi Fiona,

I ran a deeper analysis and here is the result. What do you make of it?

Thanks

--Edit--

The drive is 2TB

Seeing the results I have two questions:
-Why is there a "FAT16 <32M" and another FAT32 partition when I am suppose to only have 1 partition in NTFS?
-Do you think it is possible to reset it to NTFS and thus refresh my drive, so to speak?
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User avatar
Fiona
Posts: 2835
Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 17:19
Location: Ludwigsburg/Stuttgart - Germany

Re: External drive suddenly unallocated

#4 Post by Fiona »

It's not a result but just a message that you can't recover this partition because it's out of the limit of your disk.
At this screen you should easily confirm with enter to bget to the results.
I have no idea why on your second screen you geometry (the values) at disk are changed?
You can compare it to your first screen.

Fiona

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