Cloning Challenge Seagate Drives Uninitialized Error

[fzabkar]

ISTM that R-Studio's search was too broad. The "27,974 Fat Entries" don't sound like something that you should see in an NTFS volume.

If you would like to try DMDE, then it shouldn't take too long. If you r-click the Noname partition and select NTFS Search Within the Partition, you will see a "select scan area" dialogue box. Click Search and DMDE will begin searching for NTFS remnants. When it finds a volume, you can pause the search by clicking Start/Stop. Then highlight one of the found volumes and click Open Volume. Save the search log when prompted. This will allow you to resume the search at a later time by specifying the log file. If the volume's file/folder tree is the one you are looking for, then you can recover your files to another drive (r-click, Recover). Otherwise, select Drive -> Partitions and repeat the above process, only this time click Load to load the previously saved log file and click Start/Stop to continue scanning.

[fzabkar]

Important Question I have: When a drive is cloned by an expert, do you typically get back something that looks like what you had before with just missing folders and/or files? Or does it all come back as just random files that need sorted? Forgive my ignorance if this is a super stupid question.

That would depend on how much damage was done. Sometimes only a "raw" recovery is possible, ie no file/folder structure or file names.

[laurelt]

got it. I think I'm ready to send the drive off and hope for the best. Seeing a few of the things that R-Studio did get for me that I don't readily have access to without downloading it off Facebook or something like that made me want to tear up. Can't have that. I will set up the new WD Cloud and get my backups going and contact some folks I've read posts from here and see if they will work with me on this debacle. I can keep playing around with the clone and salvage what I can in the meantime, but tomorrow and Friday I have to get back to work to pay for the DR expert

thanks for all your help and suggestions.

[fzabkar]

I suspect that all you need to do with the original drive is to repair sector 0. That's easy. Of course you will then need to clone it again, or at least mount the file system and save the most important files. If I were in your position, I would take a break and come back to it when your nerves have settled down.

[laurelt]

You're too kind. I'm afraid I am so far over my pay grade that I may inadvertently do something (else) stupid. I just don't want to render it to the point that nobody can fix it. My husband hates to give up too, but it's my fault for not getting this stuff more backed up more frequently and then I could and would risk it for the learning experience. BUT if I have to pay stupid tax to a trained professional and still get most or even some of my stuff back in the order it was, well, that would be wonderful. AND if all that needs done is repair sector 0 and the DR specialist can do that, well, even better!