Drive not accessible, shows as "unformatted". Guidance?

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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dsutton
Posts: 2
Joined: 15 Mar 2012, 19:12

Drive not accessible, shows as "unformatted". Guidance?

#1 Post by dsutton »

I have a Western Digital 750gb drive that was working fine until one day it was inaccessible. The computer (windows 7) now tells me that the drive is inaccessible and must be formatted. I don't know what happened, but i have a feeling my data is still intact somewhere on this drive. The windows disk manager shows the partition as "RAW".

I have run testdisk and when I select "Analyse", here's what I see:

Image

Next, I select "Quick Search", and I see this:

Image

I press Enter to continue:
Image

There are limited options with the Extended partition, so I press the down arrow to move to the Logical partition, then select "List". I see this:
Image

Finally, I try the "Boot" option to see what happens:
Image

I didn't take any further action.

Can anyone advise me on what i should do to try to access my data? Thanks.

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

Re: Drive not accessible, shows as "unformatted". Guidance?

#2 Post by Fiona »

Did you run Deeper Search in TestDisk?
If your partition was created using windows 7, your partition will be aligned on megabyte boundary.
Those partitions starting after 1 MB.
If an earlier partition was created using intel standard, a remnant can be found and displayed first.

Otherwise, it would look like, that your file system is damaged.
In case, you can try PhotoRec.

dsutton
Posts: 2
Joined: 15 Mar 2012, 19:12

Re: Drive not accessible, shows as "unformatted". Guidance?

#3 Post by dsutton »

Yes, I tried Deeper Scrub. It didn't work.

I just tried PhotoRec, and it is able to recover all my files, albeit without original filenames.

That's better than not getting the files back :)

Thank you Fiona

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cgrenier
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Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 15:08
Location: Le Perreux Sur Marne, France
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Re: Drive not accessible, shows as "unformatted". Guidance?

#4 Post by cgrenier »

Try TestDisk, Advanced, select the NTFS partition, Boot, RepairMFT. Maybe you will have access to your files this way.

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