Recover Data after turning HDD to basic

[Paprika110]

Hi all
Stupidly I have turned one of my extra drives from dynamic to basic and now the disk is recongnised as empty. Is there a software that will be able to see the drive and recover the data that I have in it? The hard drive is a 1TB hitachi HTD7210010 sla360 satadrive. Because the data are very valuable to me I would like a confident solution before playing with it.

Thank you guys

[pepe]

it depends... what kind of dynamic partition did u have? was it striped, or spanned?

pepe

[Paprika110]

Are you talking about RAID? I didnt have a RAID configuration. The drive was in one computer used only as an extra storage (no raid configuration). It was added to my existing system because I needed more space and it was partitioned through windows.
I have removed the drive to read the data on another computer through a usb. The first time I could not read the data and went through "Disk Management" on windows and managed to read it by turning it from offline to online. The second time I pressed the wrong selection and turned it to basic.

[pepe]

I would say u need a disk editor and some knowledge on partition table structure and partition types, but the most important thing would be to image the drive first and work on the copy, as any wrong move can cause more harm.
If u are not confident what i am saying I recommend finding some reputable DR firm, at this point such recovery should not hurt much $$$.

pepe

[chinopk]

DO NOT COPY ANY DATA ON THAT DRIVE UNLESS YOU GET YOUR DATA...

VERY IMPORTANT

do you have any partitions on that drive ?

If yes try some partition recovery software, like acronis, partition table doctor etc.. this way you can save a lot of time as compare to running a data recovery software and scanning the whole surface for data..

Data recovery is very senstive you can loose your data in a jiffy, be careful..

[xsoliman]

Converting it to Basic has cleared the partition table
Assuming it only has a simple volume on it before (which is likely based on your description)
You can 'easily' create a partition entry for the previous simple volume
after locating where it starts and how big it is
('easy' = easy if you've done it before and know where to look and what partition table structures to set up)

One of the tools mentioned above can probably do it

Else could scan the whole disk and just recover files to another drive, that that over-kill and slow and shouldn't be necessary in this case

[fzabkar]

If all that has happened is that your partition table has been overwritten, then you could easily reconstruct it by hand with a disc editor. I have recently been through such a procedure at Seagate's forums.

See this thread:
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/ATA-and-Se ... /m-p/52604

Otherwise you could use TestDisk or Partition Find and Mount (freeware):

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
http://findandmount.com/

However, before using any data recovery software, I would first survey the damage, as in the Seagate case. Don't be tempted to use Microsoft's FIXMBR command, at least not until you have examined the MBR.

[Paprika110]

Hi guys
Sorry for taking time to reply but due to work. I would like to work first on copying the image first I bought a new hard drive to create save the image it. "Acronis true image home" does not let me copy from it, maybe because it sees a healthy "empty" drive. Do you know any other software or version of acronis that would let me copy the image no matter what it sees on the drive?

After that I will try restoring the partion and MBR.
Thank you guys

[Paprika110]

I used "Partition Find and Mount" and managed to recover the partitions flawlessly. Now I am at the process of saving all the data and it takes ages as the data are approximately 500GB. At the moment everything seems to be there. As expected it was only the MBR that was damaged. Now I need a good backup software to use once a week to avoid disasters in the future.

Thanks to all the guys that replied to my thread,
Pepe, Chinopk, Xsoliman and Fzabkar.