My friend has a corrupted 4TB external HDD
Posted: 23 Nov 2023, 20:07
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'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!