NTFS partition vanished from 3TB HDD

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Author
cbs77
Posts: 2
Joined: 05 May 2014, 16:48

NTFS partition vanished from 3TB HDD

#1 Post by 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
testdisk_1.gif (13.51 KiB) Viewed 1984 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
testdisk_2.gif (13.24 KiB) Viewed 1984 times
There I selected 'Advanced' and got the following message:
testdisk_4.gif
testdisk_4.gif (10.97 KiB) Viewed 1984 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

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cgrenier
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Re: NTFS partition vanished from 3TB HDD

#2 Post by 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
Posts: 2
Joined: 05 May 2014, 16:48

Re: NTFS partition vanished from 3TB HDD

#3 Post by cbs77 »

cgrenier wrote: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
testdisk_5.gif (12.09 KiB) Viewed 1952 times
I continued with 'RebuildBS' and after searching through the MFT the result was this:
testdisk_6.gif
testdisk_6.gif (12.6 KiB) Viewed 1952 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

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