Hello everyone,

I have an external Western Digital MyBook 2TB (RAID 1). There was about 1.6 TB of files on it. Then I tried to create a new partition on the drive in the free sector, with Paragon Partition Manager. After starting the procedure and waiting for some time, I realized that this would take forever, so I had to abort it (after two days, at 2%) while the main partition was moved.
After that, the HDD is shown as being unformatted.

I tried GetDataBack and it finds the whole DataTree / folder structure, but when i restore the files, they are corrupt, meaning that for example a video would be a song and so on, most of the files plain don't work anymore. So apparently A LOT of data has been moved to a new position already or the file index is messed up or something.

What can I do? Please help!

PS: I'm using windows 7.

Badly messed up. Maybe raw recovery from signature is going to give best results in less time, but forget filenames. It is a typical case of data reconstruction.

Badly messed up. Maybe raw recovery from signature is going to give best results in less time, but forget filenames. It is a typical case of data reconstruction.

Thank you for your reply!

How do I do a "raw recovery from signature"? Which software can do this?

Hallo,

Du kannst z.B. Winhex, oder Ontrack's EasyRecovery Pro benutzen. Or just perform a google search for raw recovery software to find a bunch of other software with this capability.

I don't understand why aborting the procedure in an orderly manner resulted in a damaged the file system, unless some data were never flushed from the write cache. AFAICS, if Paragon Partition Manager was in the process of compacting your partition, then the boot sector should have remained intact until the end.

"Unformatted" would suggest that either the boot sector (LBA 63 ?) or partition table (LBA 0) may be damaged. I would examine both with a disc editor in read-only mode. This may give you a clue as to what happened.

fzabkar,
Data has shifted, that's what happened.

Or better : entire blocks of data were shifted/moved but the referencese were NOT updated (yet).

Thank you for your replies.


Paragon Partition Manager actually gives a warning when one tries to abort saying that it will possibly result in data loss / damage. But I had no other option..


yes, that's what i suspect.

I had already tried PC Inspektor File Recovery and he said there was a boot sector error.
After that I tried with TestDisk, which found some files (very few), but they're also corrupt. But TestDisk seems to have fixed the boot sector error, or at least PCIFR doesn't complain about that anymore.

Anyway, I will follow the suggestion now and try the raw recovery.

Has the partition shrunk, or is it still its original size?

I still don't understand why Paragon could not have aborted without risk of damage. AFAICS, all it would have been doing at the time would have been defragmenting and compacting the partition. When the user types Abort, Paragon moves current file, updates MFT, and terminates. What's so difficult about that? Surely that should be no more dangerous than aborting a defrag in FAT32 ???

Try RR first for the relevant files you need. If OK go on. If not, PM me, we have a custom solution for this kind of problem and excellent references. It is even possible now to send drive images remotely, even if sending 2x 1 TB is not a joke...