WD Scorpio Blue 250GB recovery

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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semantix
Posts: 1
Joined: 25 Jul 2012, 01:13

WD Scorpio Blue 250GB recovery

#1 Post by semantix »

Hey folks,
Here's my story: I had a laptop with a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 250GB WD2500BEVT drive. I got a tower, and took the drive from my old laptop (the WD Scorpio Blue in question) and reformatted it with one partition, then copied all of my music, videos, documents, etc. to it. I've recently moved to a new location, taking this data drive with me but ditching the tower. I have a new laptop, and upon trying to load up my old WD Scorpio drive, Windows tells me "You need to format the disk in drive H:" so something happened to the filesystem of the drive in transit.

Here's some info on the drive: it was reformatted using Linux, but I sadly do not know the format I used, the program I used, or even the Linux distribution I used. I imagine it's ext2/3/4 but I'm not sure - and neither Windows nor TestDisk seem to know. However! When I open up PhotoRec, it detects an NTFS partition named 'Data&Docs' which is what I named the partition when I formatted the Scorpio drive.

My main question is: how did PhotoRec learn that useful bit of information, and can I convince TestDisk to learn it too? I have over a hundred gigabytes of files, so using PhotoRec directly is a bit unwieldy. I would really like to have my filesystem back instead.

Please let me know what information you'll need to help me out, and I'll furnish it best I can. Here is a screenshot from PhotoRec: http://imgur.com/wLOrb

Any here is what TestDisk was able to find (this is the configuration that gave any partitions at all - other settings return no partitions at all).:

#1343166001 Disk /dev/sdb - 250 GB / 232 GiB - CHS 484521 16 63
1 : start= 6579571, size=1917848077, Id=70, *
3 : start=225735265, size= 10, Id=72, *
2 : start=1953251627, size=1818575915, Id=43, *

Clearly none of these is the partition table for a 250 GB drive. TestDisk also mentions something about "relative bad sectors" which I looked up and did not fully understand. Here is a screenshot: http://imgur.com/S6S4X .

Thanks for your help.

Sam
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