cgsecurity.org

Hi, noob here.

The contents of my 3TB HDD suddenly disappeared; It's still recognisable by the PC but says it has to be formatted.

I did some research and downlaoded the "testdisk" program. When I ran it, it could only detect ~800GB of the 3TB so I did some further research as it says it needs to be 'correctly detected for a successful recovery' with no luck, so ended up here.

What is there I can do, and any more information I can give to be more useful?

Can you boot from a Linux LiveUSB (ie. Fedora), run the Linux version of TestDisk and check the reported disk capacity ?

cgrenier wrote: 16 Jan 2020, 06:45 Can you boot from a Linux LiveUSB (ie. Fedora), run the Linux version of TestDisk and check the reported disk capacity ?

Don't know how to do that. Anything I can do with W7?

Zdnc wrote: 16 Jan 2020, 16:37 Don't know how to do that. Anything I can do with W7?

Download knoppix linux from here
Either burn to a dvd or write to an empty usb flashdisk using a tool like rufus, linuxlive USB Creator or yumi
Boot Knoppix from CD/USB
Open the terminal icon next to the start button and type testdisk

Be very careful in testdisk as it is very easy to completely screw up your disk and remove all hope of recovery. it is worth googling a beginner's guide and learning how to navigate it.

Sadly this is as much as i can help you as i'm no disk recovery expert.

English Manual:

https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf

Multilingual documentation:

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk