My name is Panagiotis and I'm from Greece. Sorry in behalf if my English are not so good. So here is my story. I bought a Seagate Freeagent GoFlex Home 3TB. I didn't like the way it was working with the network so I got it out of the case and put it on an external disk case. It was only showing me about 700 - 800 GB so I read over the internet and I saw that I should format it as a GPT partition and so I did. I got 2794,39 GB free space. Everything good so far. I was filling the disk with movies, music, photos etc.....everything fine....till the free space got at 800GB. Then I tried to transfer a pack of movies 300GB. After a few hours I went back to my computer to see how it was going with the transfer. There was a message...something like....''cannot write to sourse'' something like that. I press cancel and did a restart. The disk was showing as RAW. I tried to fix it with chkdsk and after lots of attempts I put it as an internal disk in a desktop pc and start a chkdsk before entering windows. The chkdsk started and I saw a lot of delete's in the list as it was checking the disk. When it finished the disk was ok but there was about 1TB of files missing. I Google it and someone from Greece had the same problem but his disk was MBR. We wrote that you should choose GPT (GUID Partition Table) or else you can't use the last 764GB from the 3TB. But I had already formatted it in GPT.
What I want to ask is
1. If anyone knows a way to find my lost files cause I tried lots of programs like Stellar Phoenix, EaseUS, R-studio but I cant find them. I don't want to restore them just to see what I had...so I can download them again.
2. If anyone knows why I had that problem...so I can avoid it later when I start filling my disk again.

Long story I know......sorry.

Waiting for your kind reply.

Thanks

as said above, but are you sure the drive you got was 3TB and not tricked....

Shane

Yeah !!!!!
I got it new in the box with Segate warranty and everything.
It worked fine till it got at 750GB free space....and then.....what I wrote above

Typically is very difficult to undo the damage caused by chckdsk.

If I recall correctly, someone posted on the forum here a link or explanation of a utility or software which may be used to essentially return the files to their original file type. Meaning a file that is to be a jpg file, after chcksdsk has a different file extension. This utility could help in returning the file back to its native file type. Search around here and you may find that thread.

The alternative is to rename manually for each file in some hex editor, however, since there is so much data, this is not feasible.

Needless to say, chckdsk more than likely destroyed the data structure, so very low chance that can be restructured, fact specifically confirmed by the lack of success you have had with the tools you have already run.

Best wishes

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The problem is that your external enclosure has a 32-bit LBA limitation. Your mistake is that you probably partitioned and formatted the drive inside your computer, where there is no such limitation, and then transferred it to your external enclosure. Microsoft's OS is too stupid to notice that the capacities of the partitions exceed the capacity of the physical drive (or USB mass storage device), so it doesn't warn you of impending doom. Everything proceeds without incident until you try to copy data beyond the 2TiB point. As soon as you do this, the time bomb detonates, the data wraps around to sector 0 and trashes your file system.

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Agree with that diagnosis, but partitioning & a quick format of the 3TB drive, done in that (2TB-limited) USB enclosure, would also have appeared successful - that doesn't have to have been done in the PC first, in order to fall into the trap. If a full format (Win Vista or later) had been done with the drive in that enclosure, the problem would have been exposed at the end of that process. However a full format would take a while for 3TB via USB2 (e.g. 24 hours)

I have formatted the drive from USB...in GPT.

Anyway.....I'm thinking of stop trying to recover and just start to fill it again.

What should I do and how I should format it so I won't have the same problem again?

format it with NTFS with something like 2 x 1.5Tb partitions or 3 x 1TB and you should have no issues (if the drive is ok of course)

@HaQue,


That approach (of keeping the partition size below 2TB) would only work if the problem was related to the partition size. Your suggestion would still allow the OS to (try to) store data and filesystem metadata beyond the 2TB LBA of the drive. If (as fzabkar suggested, and I agree) a plausible explanation is related to addressing limitations of the USB enclosure, and in that case the partition size is not relevant.

Can you explain your theory of how limiting partition size, while still allowing all 3TB of the drive to be seen and used (or at least try to be used) by the OS, will prevent the OP's problem? Perhaps you've spotted something in the OP's story which others haven't...

@ptzelepis,

If the theory previously explained by fzabkar is correct (and I've seen the same problem in the past, with similar results to yours, so I agree with it based on current data), then the problem is your choice of USB enclosure for use with a 3TB drive - not all of them support >2TB drives. Either you need a USB enclosure which properly supports a 3TB drive, or you need to limit yourself to using a maximum of 2TB e.g. by not having any partition (and therefore any filesystem) use any of the drive above the 2TB point, or setting a DCO or HPA to limit the reported drive size to 2TB (the latter two can only be done using specialised utilities with the drive connected via SATA - I don't recommend these solutions for novices, but include them just for completeness).

Of course if HaQue's different theory is correct, then the solution is different too.

I can suggest tests which would help to confirm which theory is correct, if you want that, but they would permanently erase the data on that drive. Your choice

Well might be best to ignore everything I said because
a) I did not pickup that the OP took it from a NAS, and
b) I was naively thinking of FAT32 limitations and
c) skimming forum posts without reading properly and thinking.

I hadn't thought about the limitations of the actual enclosure because I had not come across it before, and because the OP has currently not posted WHAT enclosure he used or any specs about it.

Maybe the solution would be to buy an enclosure that does support > 2TB