Failed Drive

Using TestDisk to repair the filesystem
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jools
Posts: 4
Joined: 07 Sep 2012, 21:51

Failed Drive

#1 Post by jools »

Hello all. I recently had the internal HDD (Seagate Momentus 320GB) in my laptop completely fail on me. It was working fine, then the machine froze, and upon restart the computer went repeatedly into Windows startup repair, which was unable to fix the problem. I have now removed the drive, and attached it via a SATA/USB docking station to my desktop PC, which is running Windows 7. The HDD comes up as M:, but shows as empty, and the drive properties show 0 free space 0 used space with a full pie chart
(no free space). In diskmgmt.msc it shows it as Raw. The drive has a second recovery partition which is 15GB, using Testdisk v 6.14 it will only show the recovery partition, and not the main one. I would really like to recover the data on this drive, so any help you could offer would be appreciated. Thanks.

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cgrenier
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Re: Failed Drive

#2 Post by cgrenier »

If you run TestDisk and go in the Advanced menu, do you see your data partition ?

jools
Posts: 4
Joined: 07 Sep 2012, 21:51

Re: Failed Drive

#3 Post by jools »

Yes both partitions are there. I've attached a screenshot of the Advanced screen. If you let me know which way to proceed with testing through Testdisk I can also post a log. Thanks.
320GB.jpg
320GB.jpg (54.13 KiB) Viewed 5025 times

jools
Posts: 4
Joined: 07 Sep 2012, 21:51

Re: Failed Drive

#4 Post by jools »

Update. I attempted to perform a Quick Format through Windows, as I understand that I can re-write the filesystem while keeping the data recoverable, but it was unable to complete the format.

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cgrenier
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Re: Failed Drive

#5 Post by cgrenier »

Reformating a partition erases data, so it's always a bad idea.
Try PhotoRec on the partition, you may still be able to recover some data.

jools
Posts: 4
Joined: 07 Sep 2012, 21:51

Re: Failed Drive

#6 Post by jools »

So you don't think that the drive can be saved by rebuilding the filesystem?

shawnwoods
Posts: 2
Joined: 29 Oct 2012, 12:06

Re: Failed Drive

#7 Post by shawnwoods »

I don't think any of the data you saved can be recovered now.

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