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I have a 3TB WD HDD that was in an external enclosure using USB 3.0, and when trying to back it up to a new 4TB HDD, a sketchy PCIe USB card caused repeated USB disconnection anytime there was any load placed on it, then finally a few days ago the partition was no longer visible. Diskmgmt sees an unformatted drive. I couldn't find any other tool to try to rescue the partition (has family stuff going back years, which is why I was trying to back up to the 4TB drive). SMART utilities shows drive is still good, and there are no unusual noises from the drive.

The testdisk-win has now been running for 3 days and is still only at 78%. I do know it is a single GPT NTFS partition using the entire drive (minus the usual first 16MB that Windows adds). So what is my options here?

This is what it has found so far:

Your options are:

1. Waiting
2. Not recovering your data

It finished sometime today after running for almost 4 full days.

This is what it shows:





This was a GPT NTFS partition that was taking up the entire 3TB drive.... Previous screen said "3000GB seems too small"... This has never been used in Linux nor Mac, only Win10.

6513886 blocks come out to 3GB, nowhere close to 3TB.

So no help or suggestions?

Have you removed the drive from its enclosure when running Testdisk?

That is how it was tested and shown in the above screenshots. Direct connection via SATA.

If your posting means yes, please explain if you put a WD drive in an enclosure or if you are refering to an assembled WD product containing enclosure and drive inside like WD Elemente, pe.e.

It may be interesting to run PhotoRec during 10 minutes to see if some valid files are recovered or not.

recuperation wrote: 30 Oct 2020, 12:10 If your posting means yes, please explain if you put a WD drive in an enclosure or if you are refering to an assembled WD product containing enclosure and drive inside like WD Elemente, pe.e.

It is sold as WD MyBook which is drive inside of an enclosure, I popped open the enclosure and connected directly to SATA. The SATA to USB is a very small adapter board with USB and power, so very unlikely to have any kind of custom setup to it that would affect drive access.

cgrenier wrote: 30 Oct 2020, 20:42 It may be interesting to run PhotoRec during 10 minutes to see if some valid files are recovered or not.

I ran it for 2 hours and it came back with 2 large swf files, no idea what they are.