Now that I was just about ready to stop being lazy and booting on a usb stick and only doing live sessions after moving a lot of data from internal drives (I have 3 in the desktop), suddenly one of them, and definitely not the oldest (I have a 200gb very very first generation SATA WD drive in there that will not just die at all). It's a 1TB seagate drive and well, I should have kept the win7 partition as it was so I could boot it from grub, because it decided to be unable to mount in linux and even using Hiren's Boot 15.2 mini-xp...Minitools Partition Wizard and others (the mini live win7 just won't boot, the 2 boot manners there don't work), it would see the drive but not let me do anything with it, no chkdsk as Disks and gparted in ubuntu is telling me to do in a windows environment. Minitools Partition Wizard was calling it "Bad Drive".
But testdisk sees it while in a live session. I moved all the files safely, with minimal errors to one of my mechanical external drives mounted on my swapping dock. Now I'm ready to make it work again, which isn't easy, I got no other computer with win 10 or even 8.1 to plug it into and see what a real installed windows has to say about it. My fiancée has a win10 desktop but it is a HP so it definitely has no place in it for me to add a third drive, it has 2 in there, and they are in a RAID mode, so I can't take one out.
Can I just turn that drive/partition (for some reason it always had an empty partition and under it a partition in equal size that was an "Extended Volume", linux calls the drive sdb and the part that has the files sdb5, Disks tells me the same thing. I don't know why I formatted it that way 4 years ago when I bought that drive, but it wasn't on purpose. It's the last vestige of my NTFS days....sometime a live session froze to a black screen of death, something that is bound to happen with live sessions extended over months, just as I had noticed it would have a hiccup before mounting it successfully in Caja, there was a lag time and I thought, I should move my data from there next boot....well, when I rebooted the drive was impossible to mount at all, a lot of errors about sdb5 in the boot sequence if I presse ESC and Testdisk telling me the 2 partitions on the drive are "D" as in Deleted.
As I said, I copied everything almost a 100% successfully. Can I just turn them to L or P and they will be mountable? Or I will need to reboot to see? I know the drive is not broken, the BIOS and UEFI all sees it at boot, OS's see it, just can't use it one way or another. I'm ready to be able to format it, but I can't format it in an OS that won't mount it, at least not in a traditional way. GParted would let me do it, I think, I've seen that do miracles to a partition on an external drive back in the usb 2.0 days, very slow days, where it was able to bring it back along with all the data by using the Rescue feature...but right now it just tells me to go to windows and to chkdsk on it twice etc.
Shortly, if I turn a deleted partition, I guess it will have to be both, the "real" and the "extended" one, into a non-deleted one, will everything turn back to normal? I haven't been able to do anything of use in a kind of shady windows environment, the only one I can get, through Hiren's Boot, but the mini-winxp and all the utilities in it all tell me its "a bad drive", see it but don't let me do anything with it, so chkdsk is out of question.
I assume that if I turn them back to Primary or Logical partitions, a reboot will be necessary. I don't know what happened when a live session crash caused that drive to delete its partitions and act this way, but, it works, the only thing I see going on is Disks telling me about the 96 bad sectors and the errors related to that when booting in the boot sequence. Almost all files copied perfectly and thankfully those that did not are not dramatic, what matters is that about 800 music albums transferred just fine except for one band whose folder failed entirely, but I can easily get that back
Sorry for the long winded post, start at the paragraph starting with Shortly (a polite tl;dr) to see what my actual pinpointed worry is quicker, but I like to bring in details...it was a very strange thing that caused the drive and the "Extended Partition" under the full 1TB partition (the one on top in Disks is the empty one), in Testdisk it's on top to delete itself after a live session of ubuntu mate 20.04 crashed. It's not broken and even if there is 96 bad sectors, systems and BIOS/UFI sees it down to the model, so I'm not worried about that.
Testdisk is amazing btw, no other program out there would have had me rescue 99%+ of the files/folders on there. Thanks in advance.