cgsecurity.org

I woke up this morning to a message that my Seagate external 1TB expansion drive needed to be formatted. I didn't have time to do anything before work so I unplugged it from the computer. When I came back, I used TestDisk to find the partition and [Write] it. There is and has always only been one partition. Then I rebooted as told by the software.

Now I'm being told by Windows (Vista) that the file system is corrupt and unreadable. I tried to list the files in Testdisk to see what I might be losing and Testdisk can't access the file system. Testdisk says the Boot Sector is OK, but the Backup Boot Sector is bad. I selected the option to write the Orig. Boot Sector over the Backup and Testdisk said it was unable to write over the backup. Computer management says the disk is still in RAW format.

I'm writing this message as I do a deeper scan for some other partition information. The deeper scan is taking a very long time, approximately 5-10 minutes per 1% of completion. I don't think it's going to find anything different either. I bought this drive a year ago so I could start doing backups onto it. I still haven't figured out how to do regular backups onto it, but I had been storing some manual backups of files on it.

Will rebuilding the boot sector help instead? It has to go through the entire MFT and that could take even longer.

I had the exact same problem a year ago (http://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/exte ... html#p1753). But this is a completely different disk. At least last time, I could get to the data and copy it out. In fact, this is the disk to which I copied the data when I had this problem last year. So far, this time, the file system is unreachable. I also cannot find the option to Rebuild BS. I don't know how much is on it, so I don't know if I'll have room on my C: drive for data.

I've managed to find the Rebuild BS option and it appears it may take a couple of days to finish running through the MFT. After several hours, I'm at 96076776/3907040067 or 2.5%. This 3907040067 looks like the same number of sectors as my 200GB drive. Should a 2TB and 200GB drive have the same number of sectors?

Right now I'm only at 38.4%. It's been 29 hours. Is it supposed to take this long to rebuild the boot sector?

So after 3 days, it finally finished and still showed the backup sector to be bad. Couldn't write the Boot Sector to the backup and can't read the file system or list the files.

Is there anything else to try?