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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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artition Table Lost on 3TB HDD? Please help

September 21st, 2015, 8:52

Hello,

After a reboot, one of my data HDD (Western Digital Red 3TB) is now inaccessible an shown as RAW (drive E):

Image

I've run DMDE, and that's what it sees:

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And now I'm running TestDisk, but after 32 hours of Quick Scan, it has only reached 66% and has found the following (I've selected EFI GPT as partition table type as this was what TestDisk recommended and what I'm think is right for a Windows 7 Ultimate x64 3TB partition):

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What should I do in order to recover my data, should I wait TestDisk to finish hoping that one of the partition it finds it's the correct one or should I do anything before with DMDE?

Lots of thanks for your help.

Re: artition Table Lost on 3TB HDD? Please help

September 21st, 2015, 17:31

DMDE

Select "$nomane01" then "open Volume"

Re: artition Table Lost on 3TB HDD? Please help

September 21st, 2015, 21:42

PTDD (Partition Table Doctor) has been a life-saver for me many times, maybe you might want to try this.
Due to their (idiotic) policy, you might even have to find a pirated one, because the auto-booting DOS version has been discontinued and you can't even buy it from EaseUs' official site any more.
So to everybody who you bought it IN TIME (as I gladly did as well): make sure to keep your bootable CD in a safe place, as you are not going to get it back...ever.

Re: artition Table Lost on 3TB HDD? Please help

September 22nd, 2015, 3:07

The Indicators for the $Noname01 partition are ExCxf. This is telling us that there is a corresponding entry in the GPT, a boot sector copy, and an MFTMirr. However, DMDE has been unable to locate the boot sector (indicator B) or the MFT (F). This would suggest that the beginning of the volume is corrupt.

The 802GB "found GPT" partition suggests that the drive was at one time subject to a 32-bit LBA limitation, most likely in the SATA driver. If the drive has now been switched from a 48-bit LBA environment back to a 32-bit LBA limited environment, then data loss will have occurred when data were written beyond the 2TiB point.

Re: artition Table Lost on 3TB HDD? Please help

September 22nd, 2015, 3:31

Thanks for all your help!!

@colanco: I've opened "$nomane01" volume, but I don't see anything in root, it seems MFT is corrupted,

@syntaxerror: I'll try PTDD, let's see if it can do some magic with my HDD.

@fzabkar: Could you please tell me how could I know if I'm under a 32-bit LBA environment and what should I do in order to go back to 48-bit LBA? I haven't changed my SATA drivers since one month ago more or less, when I changed from IDE to AHCI in bios as I've read this option could increase storage performance and installed Intel ICH10R AHCI driver (my motherboard is an old Asus PT6 Deluxe v2).

Re: artition Table Lost on 3TB HDD? Please help

September 22nd, 2015, 7:35

I think "ntfs search" ( or [all found] ) in DMDE should be the best option before using PTDD .
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