After changing some RAM I rebooted without realising my boot drive wasn't connected properly. Windows tried and failed to boot and altered the BIOS boot drive order.
After fixing that it rebooted OK but both partitions on the WD Red storage drive had gone. In Disk management one partition showed as unformatted, the other as unallocated.

Following advice I used testdisk and managed to restore one partition. But instead of being the same size as before, it is showing as 2047 GB and there's no second partition showing in Disk Management. (OS in Win XP)

What should I do to obtain the fill 3TB again, and is there are chance of getting anymore data from this vanished partition ?
When first installing the 3TB drive, I needed to use WD Disk Wizard (Acronis True Image WD Edition) to allocate the extra capacity over 2TB but I don't know if I can do this again without losing data.

I have not written anything to the drive, other than what testdisk did.
My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-M56S-S3.

Thank you for any advice.

Hi,

Get some application like r-studio and scan the whole drive and check it's results.
It might be that you get your data back.

Cool, thanks for the tip, will give it a try.

Regards, Kirk

The additional capacity should be accessible via DiscWizard's Extended Capacity Manager. This is a driver that presents the remaining capacity as a "virtual physical drive". DiscWizard will have created a second MBR just beyond the 2TiB point on the drive.

I expect that Partition Find and Mount may be able to see the second partition.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

I've installed and run 'Partition Find and Mount' and it does list one 801GB partition
and one 2199GB with drive letter M. (That's correct and is what was recovered with Testdrive.)

Running the recommended scan on the 801 section got to 99% and has been sitting there for about 3 hours.
I'll keep it going just in case.

One thing may be a problem - there were two 1.5TB partitions originally with drive letters M: and J:. Testdisk has increased M: to 2TB after recovering the data. Maybe this mucked up partition J:?

Also have downloaded r-Disk. Maybe try next ?

Thanks to both for helping. Please advise further.

I confess that I don't understand how DiscWizard managed to create the second partition at the 1.5TB point. I had originally thought (based on DiscWizard's documentation) that the first 2.2TB was handled by Windows XP's Disc Management and that DiscWizard handled the rest.

Could we see the partition table and boot sector(s) with Microsoft's Sector Inspector?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

If you extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file, this will generate a report file named SIout.txt.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.