Hi,

Over the years I accumulated around 20 hard drives, mostly old 80GB IDE to 160GB SATA drives. These drives kept piling up until I got sick of switching between them every time I needed files. So I opted out to buy a big HDD and backup each and every hard drive to this one single drive.

This drive was a secondary drive in my desktop PC (My main drive was a new SSD running Windows 7 Ultimate) After I was satisfied with my transfer of all drives (which took days!) I went ahead and formatted all the old drives and flogged them off on ebay (I actually made my money back for the 3TB so it was happy days.)

Here is where the problems began, I went abroad so I took my new Windows 8 laptop with me, along with my 3TB HDD in the hopes to buy an enclosure once I got there and use it externally = BIG MISTAKE!

So I bought the best enclosure I could find, SATA6, USB3 etc, and went ahead and hooked it up, however when I plugged it into the laptop it showed up as "Safely remove hardware and eject media" so it obviously reads something however nothing showed up in My Computer.

When I went into Device Manager and went to Disk Management, it shows up as 2.78GB = "Healthy (GPT Protective Partition)"

After some googling I figured this had something to do with the fact that it was formatted on Windows 7 and I was trying to read it on a Windows 8 laptop.

After trying a bunch of simplistic guides (most of them where telling me to FORMAT the drive which I definitely did not want to do) I accidently messed up and some how ended up splitting the drive in Disk Manager and now it shows up as two partitions of unallocated space.

I returned home a few weeks ago and recently had the time to hook it back up to the original computer internally, hoping this would fix the problem however in Device Manager it is also showing up as two partitions that are unallocated, and EMPTY!

I have come here in the hopes that someone could help me fix what I messed up, I have over 10 years worth of information on this drive. I'm hoping I only messed up the partition table and some how need to restore it, hopefully with your help I can and would be forever greatful!

All the help I can get is appreciated!

Thank you.

Some enclosures are configured with 4KB sector sizes while others have 32-bit LBA limitations.

I would examine sectors 0, 1 and 2 with a disc editor (eg DMDE freeware).

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Well its no longer inside the caddy, its back in the original PC but its showing up as two partitions, both unallocated, the same as when attached to the laptop.

I'm not to tech savvy to be honest, not really clued on what DMDE is but I will give it a shot.

It has something to do with GPT and Windows 8 only recognizing MBR partitions. Problem is it no longer shows either, just unallocated.

If you can beg, borrow or steal another 3TB hard disk to put recovered files on, you should be able to install them both, and run GetDataBack. If the partitions are the only things messed up, you should recover pretty much everything. I did similar thing a few years ago and GDB recovered everything.

OR

take it to a DR pro and as no damage seems to be the case, it could only cost you the same as a GDB licence, but you may have more peace of mind using someone that is experienced. Are you anywhere near Peterborough? if so contact pcimage on this forum.

Cheers

What does Partition Find and Mount find?
http://findandmount.com/

BTW, sectors 0, 1, and 2 contain the partitioning information. By examining these sectors we will be able to determine what "accident" you perpetrated on your data. As long as you didn't format your drive, the data should be mostly intact.

Here is DMDE:
http://dmde.com/

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks for the replies guys! I posted a reply a few days ago but not sure why it was never posted?

OK, so I downloaded and installed both DMDE and File & Mount. With DMDE it detected a 3TB unallocated (and a few other things that I don't understand) it also saved a text file, which is also attached.

The odd thing about File & Mount is it detects the 3TB drive as a 800GB drive (and if I remembered correctly that is actually the remaining 'free' space...) but strangely enough it detected no partitions. So I am going to run a full scan and see what happens.

Any tips / suggestions in the mean time? Do you guys need to see screenshots of other things to get a clearly image?

Thanks again!

Hi,

I just ran a full scan using Find & Mount which took a whopping 7 hours to complete, and this is the result:

All your data appear to be intact.

Sectors 264192 - 5860532223 appear to constitute your data partition.

The Microsoft reserved partition appears to have been trashed, but that's not important.

It appears that you've messed up sectors 0, 1, and 2. Could we see the contents of those sectors (in Mode -> Hexadecimal)?

Could you also show us the contents of the last two sectors, namely 5860533167 and 5860533166?

I don't know why PF&M is having trouble, but I suspect that it may have a 32-bit LBA limitation, in which case it would be useless to us.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Hi fzabkar, thanks for the reply.

Here are screenshots of the things you requested:

It appears that you have "initialised" your drive, which means that all the partitioning information has been zeroed. I believe DMDE can reconstruct the GPT structure, but I haven't seen this done on live data, so I would be hesitant to try. I'm sure I could repair your problem by hand, but it would be quite tedious over the Internet.

In short, your data appear to be untouched. You should be able to see your data if you r-click the data partition and select Open Volume, or simply double-click the partition.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Hi,

The thing is the partitions do not show up in My Computer, only through Disk Manager which means having to assign each partition a drive letter in order to open the drives...

Is that what you want me to do? Not exactly sure how that will work if it thinks the partitions are empty.

Thanks.

have you tried ignoring windows altogether, and using dmde, just using the menu to go to the disk and create a disk image of it that you can then scan with DR software such as GetDataBack?

I was referring to DMDE, not Windows.

When DMDE displays your partitions, r-click the entry that begins at sector 264192, or simply double-click it. You should then see a window with three panes. Two panes will have your folders and files, while the third pane should show your MFT.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Hi

Sorry for the late reply, I just haven`t had the time to get around to this until now.

Good news BTW I did what you said and opened the volume, and fair enough 50% of the folders are there. It says the total size is 950GB (the root folder that has all the folders in it) but I know for a fact that it is over 2TB.

It gives me two options:

1) Reconstruct File System
2) Recover Files

When I selected Recover Files it pointed to my very small 256GB SSD hard drive to recover the files to. İ Just don't have a hard drive big enough for this option.

I have not tried option 1 yet as I am worried I might break something again. What exactly does option 1 do?

Thanks again!

I've never had to use DMDE to repair a file system, so I can't offer any first hand advice. In any case I would purchase a spare drive for backup purposes, clone your damaged drive, and then work on the clone.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Hmm I see, thanks for the reply.

Is there any reason it says the files only amount to 950GB? I know for a fact I had 2TB+ of data on here.

Thanks again!

Bumpity

Sorry, I don't know.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Guys I've just sauced a 1TB HDD and will be useing this to backup the main drive.

The thing I still don't understand is that I know for a fact that I have around 2TB of data yet it only says 950GB.

Anyway the problem I am having is DMDE is asking for 48 dollars to do the full backup.

Is there any free alternatives?

@PentiumCore
Was any of your data compressed?

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts