How exactly do I recover an now unallocated partition?

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Codingale
Posts: 4
Joined: 27 Jan 2022, 09:01

How exactly do I recover an now unallocated partition?

#1 Post by Codingale »

Hi, just downloaded and I'm really confused on how to recover a drive who lost all partition data and went from working fine to "Not initialized" and the whole drive being unallocated.

I launched the program, selected my 2 TB drive that is shown in Disk Management as not initialized, and then selected Intel PC based on what I read online for NTFS partitions hit analyze, but I'm completely lost on what to do, I let it do the quick search a bit but got an error like "partition read error" and it asked me if I wanted to continue it being early AM for me I said sure and let it do it's thing while I went to sleep as it tried to scan the full disk I think, and Windows of course decided now was the time to update and rebooted over the few hours I was asleep.

I have no idea what caused my drive to do this, it's relatively new, and even had a warranty on it I believe. Here's the log, I just someone to help me try to figure this out thanks in advance:
https://pastebin.com/NYU8bfaU (log slightly trimmed to fit on Pastebin's 512KB limit)

I'm currently re-running the quick scan and will just wait for whatever instructions I get as I'm confused and might erase all the data on there on accident.

recuperation
Posts: 2720
Joined: 04 Jan 2019, 09:48
Location: Hannover, Deutschland (Germany, Allemagne)

Re: How exactly do I recover an now unallocated partition?

#2 Post by recuperation »

Codingale wrote: 27 Jan 2022, 16:59 Hi, just downloaded and I'm really confused on how to recover a drive who lost all partition data and went from working fine to "Not initialized" and the whole drive being unallocated.

I launched the program, selected my 2 TB drive that is shown in Disk Management as not initialized, and then selected Intel PC based on what I read online for NTFS partitions hit analyze, but I'm completely lost on what to do, I let it do the quick search a bit but got an error like "partition read error" and it asked me if I wanted to continue it being early AM
Full words, please, please invest so much time for me! Please replace the gamer speak from your first posting. TB and NTFS is OK.

Codingale
Posts: 4
Joined: 27 Jan 2022, 09:01

Re: How exactly do I recover an now unallocated partition?

#3 Post by Codingale »

Haha, yeah I'm a bit panic riddled because of the potential of loss of data. But essentially, my drive shows like this in Windows's Disk Manager:
Image (I'm canceling out in hopes to preventing any data loss)

It was working fine about 2 days ago, then randomly disappeared at some point, and I'm not entirely sure if it's a failure of the drive, or not as it's still within it's rated lifetime.
Running TestDisk 7.2 WIP shows "Read error at 341/231/19 (lba=5492736)" (and increments in values as time progresses), the scan is still ongoing for an full analysis (mostly did on accident as I meant to tell it Yes stop instead of No scan everything)... which I'm now not sure is needed as my partition should be near the start of the drive since the whole drive was a single partition.

As for the Intel PC thing, I at first was confused what type to select but figured that part out I believe, if you have any other questions please do help me help you haha.

recuperation
Posts: 2720
Joined: 04 Jan 2019, 09:48
Location: Hannover, Deutschland (Germany, Allemagne)

Re: How exactly do I recover an now unallocated partition?

#4 Post by recuperation »

Due to all the error messages please provide a smartmontools report as described here:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10910

Codingale
Posts: 4
Joined: 27 Jan 2022, 09:01

Re: How exactly do I recover an now unallocated partition?

#5 Post by Codingale »

recuperation wrote: 29 Jan 2022, 11:18 Due to all the error messages please provide a smartmontools report
Here you go, this was generated on Windows instead of a Live USB as I have a few tasks running that need backed up before I can reboot.
https://pastebin.com/kQbpxwfG

recuperation
Posts: 2720
Joined: 04 Jan 2019, 09:48
Location: Hannover, Deutschland (Germany, Allemagne)

Re: How exactly do I recover an now unallocated partition?

#6 Post by recuperation »

As your report contains lots of SMART information but the parameter table is missing I consider it seriously broken.
You can either contact a professional recovery lab or continue trying to duplicate the drive using ddrescue as described in the manual.
The use of ddrescue may of course deteriorate the state of the drive - as every access to a dammaged drive does.
There is no guarantee that after failing trying to rescue yourself a lab would do as good as if you hadn't undergone your own rescue efforts.

Codingale
Posts: 4
Joined: 27 Jan 2022, 09:01

Re: How exactly do I recover an now unallocated partition?

#7 Post by Codingale »

recuperation wrote: 30 Jan 2022, 14:49 As your report contains lots of SMART information but the parameter table is missing I consider it seriously broken.
You can either contact a professional recovery lab or continue trying to duplicate the drive using ddrescue as described in the manual.
The use of ddrescue may of course deteriorate the state of the drive - as every access to a dammaged drive does.
There is no guarantee that after failing trying to rescue yourself a lab would do as good as if you hadn't undergone your own rescue efforts.
For some reason, after making an image in ddrescue and rebooting the disk is now detected with zero errors, and looking at the event log it was likely an issue with what else but Windows Update. The disk now seems to be online, and all files are intact from what I can tell... this makes no sense to me but thanks for suggesting the image, I now have a backup I'm going to burn to a few Disks (at least the important stuff)

Any other things you recommend in case there was something else wrong so I can be sure it's not just Windows reporting it's fine now?

Thanks for your time again :D

recuperation
Posts: 2720
Joined: 04 Jan 2019, 09:48
Location: Hannover, Deutschland (Germany, Allemagne)

Re: How exactly do I recover an now unallocated partition?

#8 Post by recuperation »

chkdsk

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