3TB drive data recovery

[prolific96]

I have a 3TB seagate drive. It had a single 2.7TB usable partition. It was about 2TB full when I started getting write errors as if there were some 2TB size limit. I rebooted my computer and this drive shows up as RAW now and the data isn't accessible.

I have a Asus p8p67 motherboard and I was reading at a few places that there was a bug in the Intel Matrix Storage drivers that would cause problems after writing more than 2TB. I tried using TestDisk and it showed the drive as being a 746GB drive. I then updated to the latest Matrix Storage driver and it's showing up as a 2794GB drive in TestDisk.

Is there any way to get the drive back to NTFS and have the data be viewable? Testdisk is showing a bunch of warnings like this when doing a full scan. http://i.imgur.com/AXyJpls.jpg

 

[Cerb]

Is testdisk seeing it as having a large NTFS partition? You will want to do a deep search for an EFI GPT partition (I forget where in the menus, but early on, and it may say something about Vista). You want to recover the partition table(s) first, then try to get to the data.

Also, TBH, I'm not sure how to proceed much farther in Windows, than the point of seeing the data, especially if you don't have another 3TB HDD that can be overwritten (got dd for Windows, too? ).

 

[prolific96]

I've let deep search run for about an hour now and it's showing 2 partitions which are about 1.3MB each. I wrote that to the partition table, rebooted, and these partitions have files such as pvscsi.cat, pvscsi.inf, pvscsi,sys, and txtsetup.oem.

I'll let deepsearch run upto 100% since I don't really have another choice at this point, but I was under the impression that the partition data would be contained within the first 1 or 2% of the drive and the rest of it would just be actual user data. Is this not correct?

 

[Cerb]

Yes, but GUID also writes a copy to the end of the drive. Multiple partitions are OK. If you formatted it with Windows, you should have a 32MB partition, IIRC, and then the rest. But, one should be about 2.7TB.

You do not want to write partition tables back until you see the main 2.7TB one, and it looks correct (2794GB in size).