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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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3TB disc used as 2,2TB + 3TBunlocker - partition lost

October 23rd, 2018, 3:34

The owner of this 3TB Seagate was using it as 2,2TB plus was using a program called 3TB+unlocker and had important data on this 0,7GB partition. One repair shop streched the main partition to full 3TB and now data is lost. I found the partition but can't fix original names. RAW recovery found Master boot record structures and other but i didn't find them useful.
Raw results are not good enough. The owner found only one file useful for him.
Any hints how, if possible, to get original names and structures?
Attachments
Nowy obraz mapy bitowej.jpg

Re: 3TB disc used as 2,2TB + 3TBunlocker - partition lost

October 23rd, 2018, 3:57

ISTR there was a thread on Seagate's old forum (now defunct) which showed the FS structures in detail. IIRC, the drive appeared to the OS as two physical drives. The first was a real 2TiB physical drive while the second drive was a "virtual" physical drive.

That is, the "virtual" drive had an MBR and partition table as its first sector (at the 2TiB boundary of the 3TB drive), just as a real physical drive does. Therefore ISTM that you could clone the user area between 2TiB and 3TB to a separate disc image and work on it in the same way as for an 800TB physical drive.

Edit: Would it make sense to treat the 800TB virtual drive as a RAID1 with an offset of 2TiB?

Re: 3TB disc used as 2,2TB + 3TBunlocker - partition lost

October 23rd, 2018, 4:48

I have a full copy of this disk. The first partition is all good. The second starts at 4 294 969 360 but i can't see a way to reconstruct the file structures. Can't find any info about what kind of partition does the 3TB+unlocker does and use.

Re: 3TB disc used as 2,2TB + 3TBunlocker - partition lost

October 23rd, 2018, 13:28

ICBW, but ISTR that the 800TB "drive" is just a normal NTFS volume. Could we see the MBRs and boot sectors?
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