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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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Last very small partition tht I'd like to recover.

April 5th, 2016, 14:51

First thanks for all the help on the bad drive with the read errors. I recovered most everything. Out of 142053 files only 63 that were recovered are unplayable. The Western Digital WD30EZRX-00MMMB0 in the first post with the GigaByte BIOS bug problem is the last one and it's a relatively small partition at the end. It's only 125GB with only about 25GB of data. The drive still reported errors with it's size even though I could access the entire drive. I used SeaTools for DOS and set the drive back to it's original capacity. Now there's nothing. DDRescue, DMDE and Gparted all show the drive being about 800GB. Windows Explorer shows the entire drive but both partition aren't formatted. I've attached the screen captures from DMDE and Gparted along with the log file from DMDE.
Attachments
devscan_2016_03_08.log
(3.12 MiB) Downloaded 718 times
WD30EZRX_DMDE_2016_03_29.jpg
GParted_WD30_Unallocated.png

Re: Last very small partition tht I'd like to recover.

April 5th, 2016, 15:57

The reduced 800GB capacity is symptomatic of a 32-bit LBA limitation. This is either a BIOS problem or a SATA driver problem. Upgrading to the latest SATA driver would be advisable. Also confirm that the SATA controller is set for AHCI mode, not RAID or IDE compatibility mode.

Re: Last very small partition tht I'd like to recover.

July 5th, 2016, 1:10

With the Windows 10 free upgrade window closing in I really need to see if I can recover this partition. I was ready to just blow this off until I started looking at all the software I've accumulated over the years. The newer version don't really do anything that the version that I have.

Re: Last very small partition tht I'd like to recover.

July 5th, 2016, 20:16

I saw something similar when gigabyte bug made hpa on 3tb drive in 32bit environment. So I would try to un-hpa drive.

Re: Last very small partition tht I'd like to recover.

July 5th, 2016, 23:14

I've already done that once but I'm leaning that way also. I ran MiniTools Power Data Recovery and it shows the drive as approximately 2.25TB with 750GB missing. The same with TestDisk. I get an error message with TestDisk that "number of heads/cylinders mismatches 225 <NTFS> != 16 <HD>. I'm afraid of messing with it more and losing the partition but I don't know any other option.

Re: Last very small partition tht I'd like to recover.

July 6th, 2016, 4:43

You need to retrieve the Identify Device data from the drive. You can do this with the Text Copy function in CrystalDiskInfo. This will tell you the capacity that is being reported by the drive rather than by the driver.

Re: Last very small partition tht I'd like to recover.

July 6th, 2016, 11:11

Thanks TestDisk is almost done I'll post the result then I'll run CrystalDiskInfo.

Re: Last very small partition tht I'd like to recover.

July 8th, 2016, 0:10

I can't access the drive on my main computer and Test Disk doesn't see it on the other. I have PartedMagic that has a plethora of utilities is there something else that will retrieve the information?

Here's a link to PartedMagic:

https://partedmagic.com/

And the software/utilities:

https://partedmagic.com/parted-magic-2016-04-26/
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