I had upgraded my internal hard drive from a 3 tb to a 4 tb hard drive a little while back. All went well for awhile, until 2 partitions disappeared. I have a 2011 iMac with a SATA SSD for booting and a spinning hard drive divided into 3 partitions: 1 was a secondary boot Macintosh HDD with lots of data on it, 2 was a bootcamp of Windows 7 with various programs on it (hoped to update to windows 10 at some point), and 3 was "Mac Data" with downloads and other data on it. The SSD is for primary booting and most often used apps.
After I upgraded internal storage I checked to make sure all partitions on the new 4 tb were booting well and reinstalled into my iMac. All went well until 1st 2 partitions on the HDD became unmountable out of the blue. I figured the hard drive is dying and ordered a replacement hard drive. However, I am trying to use testdisk to reconstruct the partition table to access these 1st 2 partitions (Macintosh HD and BOOTCAMP) to put them onto my new 4 tb HDD. My backup is not as recent as what is on the hard drive that I suspect to be dying.
Testdisk ran once and pulled up partition sizes that seemed too small for what they should be, so I've been running the deeper scan to analyse sectors. It is at 43% and been going overnight. I will let this finish and am hoping it will resolve the sizes of the partitions. Is there anything else I should be doing, or doing instead, or is this the right path to try to get data off of these missing partitions on my internal drive.
Thanks so much in advance for your help!
