Need Tips on Recovery

[Graylander]

Hey Guys,

I'm sure you get hard drive questions a lot, so I'll be precise. I have a HD that needs recovery, obviously backing up would of been wise. I recovered this drive a month ago with MiniTool Power Recovery, and the partition came fully back. It was amazing going from other softwares only getting fragmented data to MiniTool bringing the drive fully alive. It wasn't a good time when I saved the drive, so I set aside to back up later. Well, I came to that drive today and it's not accessible like it was before. I initialized it, thinking that would resume the file structure, but it didn't. I'm hoping this wasn't a huge mistake. I'm running some deep recoveries via Minitool now, but it hasn't recovered as quickly as last time, so I'm apprehensive...

Do any of you have tips or insight to offer on this situation?

Thanks for your time,

Caleb

[pclab]

What are the symptoms/history of the drive?
What drive is?

[fzabkar]

"Initialisation" is data destructive. Hopefully all you have done is to rewrite sector 0, in which case it should be easily reconstructed by any competent software.

However, I would start by examining the drive's SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo. Look for reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors. If the drive has bad sectors, then it would be advisable to clone it, sector by sector, using a tool such as ddrescue.

Depending on the model, there may be additional procedures that you could do to improve the chances for a good recovery.

In addition to the SMART report, could you also show us the contents of sector 0 with a disc editor (eg DMDE freeware)?

[Graylander]

Thanks for the reply.

It's a 1tb Western Digital. It's several years old but barely used.

I'll run those diagnostics and update you soon.

[Graylander]

Here's the info. Attached are the scans of the two programs. I'm not sure if DMDE has what you wanted. Let me know.

Thanks!

Attachments

[Graylander]

Also, the surface test I ran has come back clean. No read errors.

[fzabkar]

The SMART report is clean. That, plus the surface scan, would suggest that the drive has no head or media problems, but this is not always conclusive.

Sector 0 has an empty partition table (offsets 0x1BE - 0x1FD). This is the expected result of initialisation.

Unfortunately DMDE has not found any evidence of the original partition structure. You could try Partition Find and Mount (freeware), but I expect that it will find nothing.

http://findandmount.com/

Otherwise you could use DMDE to Search For Special Sectors, eg NTFS boot sector, MFT record, INDX record.

[Graylander]

Okay, thanks, I'll run those.

I'm not fluent in recovery, so what does having no partition table mean in terms of getting data off the drive?

[fzabkar]

The absence of a partition table is not a serious problem, but it looks like the boot sector(s) may be missing, and maybe more. An NTFS search will tell us more.