Help me recover a HDD after erasing the first sector.

alexab · 04 Oct 2012

HDD: ST30005 28AS. Failing. I have to recover some data and throw it away.

With Seatools dos cd, I accidentally the first sector. I also set it at that time at 33 gb.
Now I can't see any partitions in it. I tried everything in HIREN's boot cd.

The drive was failing, 15 minutes at windows loading, SMART messages to backup it, etc.
I low level formatted it when it was 33 GB. My data is a few GB beyond anyway. However I played with it I can't read anything from it. Help.

Duuude, my brain is failing also, keep in mind you're talking to a moron. I started with msdos, but now I don't know anything anymore, me and PC took different paths.

UPDATE: I just copy pasted all this from another forum I wrote in.

OK, so the drive is my third, a storage drive.
I disconnected the other drives, inserted the Win7 recovery disk, but it didn't do anything. I couldn't find the ol' cmd menu I knew from other times. (Info or help -> a series of commands, including fixmbr.) It found the drive, but couldn't say anything about it. So no access, no identity, no status of it, nothing.

Windows keeps telling me to replace the drive, but sees no volume informations.
How the hell can a drive become invisible at any kind of content mode? I just used the menu from seatools and it vanished. How can it offer a delete for first sector but no fresh write of it?
What is the category or implicit software that I am looking for?

TVeblen · 04 Oct 2012

The Master File Table in a MBR disk is kept in that first part of the disk. If that was deleted then you've just got a bunch of ones and zeros and no way to put them all together. You can try a program like Partition Wizard or Recuva to see if they can rebuild the partition table (Rebuild MBR).

Unfortunately, it sounds like you've been thrashing about and "pushing buttons randomly". You may have dug yourself a hole you can not climb out of. It may be that only a data recovery company can get you out now.