Unable to recover partition on external USB hard drive

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
Forum rules
When asking for technical support:
- Search for posts on the same topic before posting a new question.
- Give clear, specific information in the title of your post.
- Include as many details as you can, MOST POSTS WILL GET ONLY ONE OR TWO ANSWERS.
- Post a follow up with a "Thank you" or "This worked!"
- When you learn something, use that knowledge to HELP ANOTHER USER LATER.
Before posting, please read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
Locked
Message
Author
mayankbhati
Posts: 2
Joined: 04 Apr 2013, 09:51

Unable to recover partition on external USB hard drive

#1 Post by mayankbhati »

My 500GB Buffalo external drive (HD-PEU2) is not getting initialized and am not able to access any of the files on it. Not sure if it is a physical damage or logical. The device does power up and is getting detected in the Device Management but as uninitialized (and asks for a new MBR to be created). It is not getting detected on any other laptop as well. I want all data to be recovered. Tried using PhotoRec but no result. Then tried TestDisk and even did a deeper search but no partition found. Am afraid to initialize the disk as I have read in other posts that it will delete all the data whatsoever on the drive and make recovery near to impossible. Attaching the screenshots from TestDisk and Disk Management. Please help.
Thanks in advance for any help on this.

mayankbhati
Posts: 2
Joined: 04 Apr 2013, 09:51

Re: Unable to recover partition on external USB hard drive

#2 Post by mayankbhati »

Screenshot attached this time
Screenshot
Screenshot
Result of deeper search.jpg (198.89 KiB) Viewed 2160 times

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

Re: Unable to recover partition on external USB hard drive

#3 Post by Fiona »

Since W2k partitions under windows must be initialized.
Otherwise windows can't handle it.
Initializing affects only your partition MBR /partition table.
So it doesn't touch any partition, file system and underlying data.
Afterwards you can repeat your diagnose running Analyse, Quick and if no partition is found Deeper Search also.
In your testdisk folder you find a testdisk.log.
You can either copy and paste the content in your post or zip and upload it as a file.
If you experience read errors and testdisk hang, please let me know.

Fiona

Locked