Drive became Unallocated and not having much luck recoverying

jumanji said:

Are you ready for it?

I am not. Will take sometime.

Ok
21% scanned so a bit of waiting till I get to make that 'write'.

GokAy said:

In case it gets to that point:

Another tool (I guess it doesn't recover the partition but the individual files) free for another 30 hours.
MiniTool Power Data Recovery Personal 7 (100% Discount)

Thank you - I've grabbed that ... can't turn down free stuff

OK do the Write. After that Quit Test Disk.

Run Bootice and show me the sector 0 again. Then you can quit bootice.

We shall do Test disk again for nTFS Boot restore. I think you already know how to do it.

No log
Select Disk
Intel
Advanced
Boot
If Primary Bootsector is bad but backup OK BackupBS

Shall be back after dinner.

This is the sector after the write

jumanji said:

I had seen the article you had referenced but I can't catch where it says when the files can't be listed it is a bad idea to write the partition table. I shall do a deeper search :) at my leisure and see where it says so. Does it also say in such a case what you should do?

In any case, you do have an option to undo it. I have provided for it :) .The sixteen byte partition table that was written by TestDisk in your case is highlighted below.

It's about 20% down the page - after 13 of those black screenshots I believe.
This is the quote:

"Press
Q
to go back a screen and then press enter to get to this screen.
Select WRITE and press enter in order to write our new partition table to the drive.
DO NOT WRITE A NEW PARTITION TABLE IF YOU DID NOT SEE YOUR FILES/FOLDERS That means the proper partition table was not found and you will have to try a different technique to recover your data."

In the blog comments he says it again:

"Also, to anybody else reading this, make sure that your files and folders are properly listed in the step before choosing to WRITE the new partition table. If it is not correct then writing it is not going to change it and make it correct."

Again all examples I see they have more than one partition. I've seen no one operate directly on the the first partition that shows only

*HPFS NTFS

There's always at least another one that crops up with

D or P in front of the partition.

jumanji said:

I shall keep this option in reserve until I decide to give up and return your drive to you as it was before. But I haven't. Not yet. :)

Ok yes we have that option. But I didn't know if anything else changed when I tried to rebuildBS. I stopped before it found anything realising that this wasn't going to be any good because both boot sectors show OK.

jumanji said:

Note: Do not lose patience and format the drive. We still have many options left.

I'm trying not to but the logic tells me that the filesystem is corrupted badly and I've not found too much on what to do when the partition is restored and that FS is still showing damaged.
My recover efforts show that not all files are found which may be another clue.

Here's Diskmanager. It's interesting to note that when I fired up Partition Wizard and also Easus Data recovery they both show that partition as being NTFS. Diskmanager says RAW.

Sorry .. forgot to include this:

SIW2 said:

I would check with Aomei part assist, see if it actually recognised as mbr disk. It might also have better luck at partition recovery.

I do this stuff quite a lot. Often one partition manager will find something another doesn't. Both Aomei and pguru are useful in tricky situations.

I can restore sector 0 after saving the written partition and give it a try . Which should I try first do you think?