Drive C partition unallocated

Kaktussoft · 13 Feb 2013

zirch said:

I did not see my Windows 7 drive. I am seeing a lot of drives with "Boot" label. Here is the camshot:
Attachment 254981

What do I do next? I hope the data is still recoverable?

I don't know why it's labeled Boot and why it's 3MB. I've seen it many times before. Not real partitions of course. Now do a "full scan" in the "unallocated space".

How did it happen? Did you mess around with partitioning software?

The pointer in partition table is gone (is not pointing to start and end sector). No NTFS structures are found in unallocated space.... so it looks like someone wiped partition or corrupted it.

You can try http://www.powerdatarecovery.com/fre...partition.html as well. But I think it's actually the same

zirch · 13 Feb 2013

Running the full scan now.

I had written a new partition table according to the instructions here: » How To Fix: External Disk Drive Suddenly Became RAW when this problem occurred before I turned to this forum. Did I messed it all up by doing it?

Kaktussoft · 13 Feb 2013

zirch said:

Running the full scan now.

I had written a new partition table according to the instructions here: » How To Fix: External Disk Drive Suddenly Became RAW when this problem occurred before I turned to this forum. Did I messed it all up by doing it?

TESTDISK didn't find the partition that's missing now. So no pointers to that space anymore... making it unallocated. Did you do a "boot sector repair" as well as described on that link? I don't think so, because it didn't find the partition.... so can't do it.

Was partition RAW just before running testdisk? What software told you it was RAW?

Kaktussoft · 13 Feb 2013

PQSERVICE partition size is 9.7GB. Very strange. Was it always that size? Normally it's about 16GB As far as I know. Do you remember?

Lucky you... testdisk didn't recover it to sizes like 100GB. So C drive space will be used by PQSERVICE.

But main problem occured all of a sudden . Hibernation went fine.... but harddisk was damaged when doing a reboot.
You did nothing special afterwards? I don't care about bootrec/fixmbr and "rewrite mbr".

PQSERVICE and DATA were still on disk when running testdisk?

zirch · 13 Feb 2013

Kaktussoft said:

zirch said:

Running the full scan now.

I had written a new partition table according to the instructions here: » How To Fix: External Disk Drive Suddenly Became RAW when this problem occurred before I turned to this forum. Did I messed it all up by doing it?

TESTDISK didn't find the partition that's missing now. So no pointers to that space anymore... making it unallocated. Did you do a "boot sector repair" as well as described on that link? I don't think so, because it didn't find the partition.... so can't do it.

Was partition RAW just before running testdisk? What software told you it was RAW?

I did not do a boot sector repair. I used Windows Recovery and tried chkdsk drive C. But it returned "the type of the file system is RAW. chkdsk is not available for RAW drives".

zirch · 13 Feb 2013

Kaktussoft said:

PQSERVICE partition size is 9.7GB. Very strange. Was it always that size? Normally it's about 16GB As far as I know. Do you remember?

Lucky you... testdisk didn't recover it to sizes like 100GB. So C drive space will be used by PQSERVICE.

But main problem occured all of a sudden . Hibernation went fine.... but harddisk was damaged when doing a reboot.
You did nothing special afterwards? I don't care about bootrec/fixmbr and "rewrite mbr".

PQSERVICE and DATA were still on disk when running testdisk?

I am not aware of the PQSERVICE partition until when I was running testdisk.

As far as I can remember, I didn't do anything special afterwards. Prior to this, I've tried booting Linux Mint from USB drive to try to access the files. I used Windows Recovery but it could not detect any OS. Then tried the command prompt, tried to fix the MBR. Also wrote the partition table according to the link I gave above.

Yes, PQSERVICE and DATA were still on disk when running testdisk.

When I was in Windows Recovery, in the window that appear when I choose to load drivers, I can see PQSERVICE and DATA. Double-clicking partition C, however, will ask for a drive format.

zirch · 13 Feb 2013

Finished the full scan. The result is still the same, with lots of partition labelled as "boot".

I noticed that while booting Linux Mint from USB drive, there are messages which says "Buffer I/O error on dev sda, logical block 0". Does it signify anything?

Camshot here:

Drive C partition unallocated-image-3.jpg

Kaktussoft · 13 Feb 2013

zirch said:

Kaktussoft said:

zirch said:

Running the full scan now.

I had written a new partition table according to the instructions here: » How To Fix: External Disk Drive Suddenly Became RAW when this problem occurred before I turned to this forum. Did I messed it all up by doing it?

TESTDISK didn't find the partition that's missing now. So no pointers to that space anymore... making it unallocated. Did you do a "boot sector repair" as well as described on that link? I don't think so, because it didn't find the partition.... so can't do it.

Was partition RAW just before running testdisk? What software told you it was RAW?

I did not do a boot sector repair. I used Windows Recovery and tried chkdsk drive C. But it returned "the type of the file system is RAW. chkdsk is not available for RAW drives".

Drive letter are just..... drive letters. They are defined in current registry of RUNNING windows. So it can be called C in running win7 (it was). But it's called nothing at all in windows recovery. Most likely PQSERVICE is called C then!! It's called RAW because is some kind of special hidden FAT32 partition

Kaktussoft · 13 Feb 2013

Is it a seagate disk? Use seatools bootable CD to diagnose the physical disk.
Western digital has a diagnostics tool as well. Post results

zirch · 13 Feb 2013

Kaktussoft said:

zirch said:

Kaktussoft said:

TESTDISK didn't find the partition that's missing now. So no pointers to that space anymore... making it unallocated. Did you do a "boot sector repair" as well as described on that link? I don't think so, because it didn't find the partition.... so can't do it.

Was partition RAW just before running testdisk? What software told you it was RAW?

I did not do a boot sector repair. I used Windows Recovery and tried chkdsk drive C. But it returned "the type of the file system is RAW. chkdsk is not available for RAW drives".

Drive letter are just..... drive letters. They are defined in current registry of RUNNING windows. So it can be called C in running win7 (it was). But it's called nothing at all in windows recovery. Most likely PQSERVICE is called C then!! It's called RAW because is some kind of special hidden FAT32 partition

I see. I forgot about that. So, is there any way I can proceed? Should I try to use the Power Data Recovery Tool? Though I have no idea how to use it this way. I don't suppose I can boot it into a USB drive and run from there as well?