Data / Partition Recovery Help

[FiDo14DiDo]

I put myself in a pickle and was hoping there are experts here that can help. So I had a 3TB Seagate HDD in GPT formatted as NTFS as my backup drive. This thing was working just fine while it was parked inside my Netgear router but I thought there was possibly file corruption issues occurring with the drive just based on performance. So I pulled it out of the router and put it into a usb enclosure to run diagnostics via my laptop. I was unaware that this old enclosure did not support such large drives and wondered why Windows was only showing me 746GB of total capacity. I (probably stupidly) initiated this disk thru Windows and this created a 128MB partition in the front of the disk but I subsequently (probably stupidly again) deleted. Long story short, my drive now reports as unallocated space thru various attempts at fixing the partitions and associated tables. Excuse me if the terminology is incorrect since this is fairly foreign to me.

After some Googling, I’ve ran Testdisk and it reports that the boot sector is fine when I try to repair it. However, the MFT and mirror MFT tables came back as bad and I haven’t been able to find any fixes for this via Testdisk (I won’t even pretend that I know how all this fits together). With PartitionGuru, the disk and partition comes back the screenshot in the attachment. Can anyone interpret this information given and have a solution on how to fix it? Any suggestions on manually editing the tables to have it work again?

http://imgur.com/ybKOk7B

At the moment, I am using GetDataBack to try to salvage files from the thing but I don’t have a >= 3TB drive. Files are showing up so I believe files are still existent but I just can’t access them due to corrupt MFT (I guess). Other notes on the situation:

• Drive can be mounted with a drive letter but Windows 8 does not recognize it. Space is showing as RAW.
• Prior to the problem, drive had a single max size partition as GPT / NTFS
• Diagnostics are currently being run with the drive in the original usb enclosure and not the outdated POS
• Drive probably had about 600GB free drive to issue
• I was not able to recover the paritions via programs like Partition Wizard
• Chkdsk will not initiate on the drive despite the drive letter assignment

http://imgur.com/ybKOk7B
Thanks

 

[Burpo]

That image of Partition Guru looks like it's showing the partition & extended partition that you made in the new enclosure. You messed up by partitioning & formatting the drive there. I wish I could help, but with it being a 3TB drive & what you did to it, poses some interesting problems.. You may be screwed.. Suggestions anyone?

 

[inachu]

Either sink more money into better data recovery
software something like: EasyRecovery Professional, Seatools, HDD Regenerator

Or if it is a must to save all the data then spend a pretty penny on sending it out and pay $800-$6,000 to get all your data back.


I agree with what Burpo said. A good chance its messed up unless you want to pay someone to fix it for you. Depends on how dear that data is to you.

 

[FiDo14DiDo]

Thanks for the input. I should have noted that I did not initiate the partition on the disk. And *believe* that the uncorrupted version of the drive already have the extended partition in place although I can’t say that with any certainty.

 

[datarecoveryguy]

Partitions and partition styles (gpt, etc) are are logical things that should not affect your data. If the data is important you should send it off to data revovery. Especially if you don't have a drive to save the data to. Do not attemp to save the data back onto to the same drive you were trying to recover. That will be a disaster.