Can't seem to get RAW drive back to NTFS

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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DillieO
Posts: 2
Joined: 27 Jul 2012, 17:28

Can't seem to get RAW drive back to NTFS

#1 Post by DillieO »

Greetings,

I have a 1TB Iomega External Hard Drive (encrypted) that recently starting giving me a "semaphore" error. After a reboot and running the tool to decrypt the drive, I got the message that the drive needed to be formatted. When I abort the reformatting, it says the drive cannot be accessed, even for chkdsk. Attempting to open the drive (G:) says that it is corrupted. Here's what it looks like in device manager.

Image

I started up Test Desk and have the following options:

Image

Note: I'm using the /dev/sdb selection because when I try to use the G: I can't write any changes to it.

I select the detected (Intel) option and go to Anlyze. Hazzah! My drive details are there:

Image

Even better is the fact that I can do a Quick Scan, and then select the drive and view my files:

Image

I have even used the copy option to restore an individual file successfully. However, there is about 400GB of data on the drive I need access to, so if possible I need to avoid copying files over.

So I hit enter to continue, and get to the screen where I write the partition. However, I get an error when attempting to do it:

Image

So I go back to the advanced section and select the "Boot" option:

Image

Attempting to repair the MFT gives the following message:

MFT and MFT mirror matches perfectly.

Attempting to RebuildBS gives me the following messages:

Image

I know the data is there, but I just can't seem to "flip the magic bit" to get it to show up properly in Windows (Vista) again.

Any help is GREATLY appreciated.
Last edited by DillieO on 30 Jul 2012, 15:38, edited 1 time in total.

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

Re: Can't seem to get RAW drive back to NTFS

#2 Post by Fiona »

Now it's possible to upload files again.
Before quota was reached.
Also you can copy and paste the content of your testdisk.log.

Please let me know a little bit more about your disk encryption.
Did you use IOMEGA proprietary tools or another program?

To get any access to your data, your drive must be decryptet.

Fiona

DillieO
Posts: 2
Joined: 27 Jul 2012, 17:28

Re: Can't seem to get RAW drive back to NTFS

#3 Post by DillieO »

Thanks for the update. I have the images updated and I'm working on getting the log file.

It did use the default IOMEGA encryption program that came with the drive. I made sure to remount things before attempting to run TestDisk.

The good news is that I was able to copy the entire contents of the drive over to another USB drive to work with while I solved the problem.

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