Damaged NTFS partition on external 1TB USB drive

[sbrothy]

Hope this is the right place. I don't know what happened to this drive. Maybe it was knocked over or something, but Windows reports it's size as 3TB unformatted. I know there was one NTFS partition filled with data and I'd like to get at it. Any ideas?

Regards, merry xmas,
Soren

[sbrothy]

When scanning the drive with DMDE (http://dmde.com/) it actually finds a lot of the files on the drive but DMDE seems to think that the drive is only 375 GB. Isn't there a method to repair the FAT when I know the size of the drive?

[mr_spokk]

Hi, If the drive was knocked over your problem could be damaged read/write heads and you should not power on this drive anymore. If the data is of importance take the drive to a data recovery company.
What model is your drive?

Regards/ Bosse

[fzabkar]

When scanning the drive with DMDE (http://dmde.com/) it actually finds a lot of the files on the drive but DMDE seems to think that the drive is only 375 GB. Isn't there a method to repair the FAT when I know the size of the drive?

It appears that the drive came out of an external enclosure. Some enclosures are configured with a 4KB sector size. When you remove such a drive from its enclosure, you expose its native 512-byte sectors and render the file system inaccessible. Essentially you end up with a 4Kn file system on a 512e drive.

8 x 375GB = 3000GB = 3TB

You need to reinstall the drive in its enclosure.

[sbrothy]

Aah... sounds like you're onto something. I've changed the drive enclosure because the power adapter to the old one broke. I never thought the problem was *that* though. I'll have to look into that. Thank you.

[EDIT]
But the drive is actually 1TB. I dunno where the 3TB thing came from... Ach, it's late and I'm a little intoxicated now. Will look into it tomorrow. Still, thanks.
[/EDIT]

[jeremyb]

Isn't there a method to repair the FAT when I know the size of the drive?

FAT and NTFS are two different file systems. The FAT file system was initially developed in 1980.. NTFS is "New Technology"

Speaking of FAT, did anyone else use to play that prank in school where you'd convince someone a floppy disks could really store hundreds of megabytes and to prove it you pop in a floppy disk where you modified the FAT header to some ridiculous value? Sort of like refurbished/fw hacked chinese flash drives..
Didn't hurt that LS-120's were coming on the market


So it gets ~350GB of data, is the data corrupt at all? Do you see folder structure?

Power bricks on external drives fail frequently or capacitors blow/leak on the interface board inside the enclosure.

[sbrothy]

The drive isn't damaged at all! It turns out that the drive *is* actually 3TB but a build-in jumper in the former enclosure restricted it's size to 1TB! This fits perfectly with the fact that only a third of the disk is used, and ofcourse the FAT (Yes I know NTFS and FAT isn't the same, I use the term loosely.) cannot be read. What marketing-idiot dreamt this up?!

But it looks like I can just put a jumper in the thing (There's no diagram but only one position.), and hopefully it'll work again. I have no jumpers here though - and I'm not about to use aluminum foil so close to "victory" - so it remains to be seen...

Regards,
Soren

[fzabkar]

What was the original enclosure?

Could we see the contents of sector 0 in hexadecimal format?

Could we see DMDE's Partitions window?