Hello,
My friend's 4TB external HDD (formatted as NTFS initially) suddenly got corrupted one day (I presume after he was unwisely never ejecting the drive from Windows), and now it lists the good old "Drive must be formatted" and RAW partition in Disk Management.
I came across TestDisk and have been extensively been reading the documentation to try to help him out. Once we analyzed the drive with TestDisk, we came across double ("duplicate") partitions on both the reserved partition and the actual data partition (as in, two partitions listed with the exact same start, end, and size for reserved and data). The error here is "No FAT, NTFS, ext2, JFC, Reiser, cramfs, or XFS marker" on both of the duplicate partitions (reserved and data). What does this mean-- are we good to try to "Quick Search" and/or a "Deeper Search" and recover the partitions, or does something else need to be fixed first?
I thought the boot sector might need to be fixed as the documentation said if you have duplicate partitions, but upon going to "Advanced," I didn't actually find any of the settings it was talking about-- just an option to create a disk image and change partition type. Maybe because that's not necessary if you actually aren't "booting" from the drive to begin with?
Any responses/help is appreciated-- thanks!
My friend has a corrupted 4TB external HDD
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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
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recuperation
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SuperBravo45
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Re: My friend has a corrupted 4TB external HDD
I evidently was pretty bad at reading the guides before-- my bad!
I do have a question with the guide you linked though. After doing a Quick Search, we get just one partition listed as a Primary partition, and after we do "P" to check the files, the filesystem is damaged (no files can be located). Are we supposed to just go ahead and write the partitions to disk with one Primary partition and then try to repair the NFTS boot sector afterwards, or is a Deeper Search required to recover properly? There was only one NTFS partition on there besides for the reserved one before-- not sure if there is supposed to be two then. (FYI, the reason we haven't fully done a Deeper Search is because we started one but it literally looked like it was going to take days with how slowly it was going through 486,400 cylinders.)
Thank you! (Let me know if there was some obvious reading I missed again.)
I do have a question with the guide you linked though. After doing a Quick Search, we get just one partition listed as a Primary partition, and after we do "P" to check the files, the filesystem is damaged (no files can be located). Are we supposed to just go ahead and write the partitions to disk with one Primary partition and then try to repair the NFTS boot sector afterwards, or is a Deeper Search required to recover properly? There was only one NTFS partition on there besides for the reserved one before-- not sure if there is supposed to be two then. (FYI, the reason we haven't fully done a Deeper Search is because we started one but it literally looked like it was going to take days with how slowly it was going through 486,400 cylinders.)
Thank you! (Let me know if there was some obvious reading I missed again.)