NTFS partition vanished from 3TB HDD

[cbs77]

Hi, I have WD 'Red' HDD with 3TB which I use as storage drive. It contains one NTFS partition (GPT, of course) which spans the whole disc. The computer runs Windows Vista, so larger hard drives aren't a problem.

Yesterday I wanted to connect an older hard drive from a Linux laptop to copy some files. To be able to access an ext4 partition from Windows I installed Paragon Extfs.

After a reboot, however, I noticed that the partition mentioned above simply vanished. Windows drive management only showed a RAW partition which it wanted to format (but I declined, of course).

I then downloaded testdisk and started it. On the first screen I selected the 3TB WDC W30 drive:

testdisk_1.gif (13.51 KiB) Viewed 2085 times

Here I already noticed that it only showed 746 GiB, something that only happens if you try to use such a large drive on an OS like Windows XP that doesn't support GPT.
I proceeded and chose 'EFI GPT' on the next screen:

testdisk_2.gif (13.24 KiB) Viewed 2085 times

There I selected 'Advanced' and got the following message:

testdisk_4.gif (10.97 KiB) Viewed 2085 times

Now I'm a bit unsure what to do and how I can restore the partition or at least save my data.
If someone knows how to proceed at this point I'd be really grateful.

Regards
Chris

[cgrenier]

The partition table still list your partition. In the Advanced menu, select the second partition, Boot,
if available, choose BackupBS and confirm. In all cases, choose List. Do you see your files ?

[cbs77]

The partition table still list your partition. In the Advanced menu, select the second partition, Boot,
if available, choose BackupBS and confirm. In all cases, choose List. Do you see your files ?

OK, I selected the second partition, then I chose 'Type', 'MS Data' and 'NTFS'.

'List' only returned: "Can't open filesystem. Filesystem seems damaged."

After selecting 'Boot' I got this:

testdisk_5.gif (12.09 KiB) Viewed 2053 times

I continued with 'RebuildBS' and after searching through the MFT the result was this:

testdisk_6.gif (12.6 KiB) Viewed 2053 times

And as expected 'List' didn't return any files either.
Doesn't look very good to me. I still hope there's a solution to get at least some of my files back but I'm not really optimistic.


I also googled a bit around and it seems that I have pretty much the same problem as this guy (http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1632902), just caused by a different software.

Regards and thanks for your help