I'm having a problem with my 2 TB Western Digital external SATA HD. I dropped the drive and broke the case electrical supply, so I bought new enclosure and put the hard drive in that. Unfortunately, when I added the drive to my Windows 8 machine, Windows decided it would be a good time to force updates and shut down in the middle of driver install. When I tried to reinstall, Windows would not recognize the drive in 8, 7 or XP. I got the dreaded "You need to format the disk before you can use it"
So I ran TestDisk, and following the instruction at http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step, I let it select "intel" partition and analyzed the disk. It showed two FAT 16/32 partitions in the structure, but no files. I ran the deeper search and it finally showed the files in the primary partition. Following the instructions, I wrote the new partition structure and rebooted. Windows still would not recognize the disk, so I ran TestDisk again. But running TestDisk again, now TestDisk doesn't see the partition tables through quicksearch and deeper search. I built a Linux box to see if I could see the files on the Linux machine, but no dice. I'm kinda at my wits end. The data was there, and now I can't get at it any more
Help with failed external drive Topic is solved
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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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cgrenier
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Re: Help with failed external drive
Do you still have the testdisk.log file from the first run ?
Re: Help with failed external drive
cgrenier wrote:Do you still have the testdisk.log file from the first run ?
Unfortunately, the attached log is the only one that I ran. I ran the first pass with "no log" from recommendations I found online