cgsecurity.org

Thank you for taking a moment to view this post. First, some background:

Installed a new 4tb drive as type gpt.
Divided it into two partitions (under 2tb ea), with both as ntfs.
Copied data to each partition, and one partition had issues.
Then, my act of stupidity.... I reformatted the problem partition to fat32 with 3rd party software.

The next reboot, the drive vanished.
Placing the drive into a win-7 64b machine... tells me that the drive is new and needs to be initialized.

TestDisk seems to have found both partitions, but before allowing it to do anything... it seemed prudent to ask:
Should the drive be initialized before allowing TestDisk to make changes? (ntfs to be saved, fat deleted)

My gut tells me that initializing will confuse things... but if the drive isn't initialized, then the OS won't see it.
What am I missing?

Any guidance or assistance is very much appreciated.

Bob C.

Do not initialize the partition table or reformat the filesystems.
When TestDisk shows the partitions, use 'p' to list the files. If the result is ok, choose to rewrite the partition table (on the next screen, choose Write and confirm).