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Another diskpart clean tale of woe
Hi guys,
Apologies for making my first post a plea for help, but I'm running out of ideas!
Brief background - I have an Intel NUC (i5/Win 10 Pro x64) running as a server while I’m living overseas, with 3 (WD Passport) external hard drives attached. I have no reason to suspect any hardware issues with any of the drives. One or more of these drives interfere with the boot sequence, and I assumed that was because there was a boot sector but no OS. I turned to google for advice and followed instructions without really understanding what they were doing which turned out to be a mistake…
(Quick edit: the NUC runs headless, using Remote Desktop from my Macbook when I need to access it)
- I ran the diskpart clean (not clean all) command on all three drives and rebooted, and found 3 unformatted drives waiting for me in Windows
- I think I inadvertently created GPT partition tables at this point, when I opened up the Windows Disk Management page and dismissed a pop up without reading it. I ran diskpart clean again to get rid of that partition table after some reading around suggested I probably wasn’t going to do any more damage. No partitions were created.
- I’ve run more or less every bit of partition recovery software I can find. I recovered one drive more or less at the first attempt, which was a single NTFS partition
- The other two drives are much more problematic, I think because they weren’t NTFS partitions (I have a Mac which doesn’t play nicely with NTFS). My 1tb drive had a single 931gb ExFAT partition on it, and my 500gb had a 200gb HFS (or more likely HFS+) partition and a further 240gb ExFAT partition. I don’t know whether either drive was using MBR or GPT
- Amongst others I’ve tried EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, Eassos Partition Guru, Find and Mount, MiniTool Partition Wizard and a few others and none have found the ExFAT partitions. They have found lots of others, mostly sub <100mb with labels like EFIBOOT, and a couple of <100gb partitions I don’t remember ever creating. I haven't gone any further than scanning for partitions with any of these tools so they should(!) not have alterered anything on the disk.
- I’ve tried Testdisk and it doesn’t find anything useful either. I don’t know which partition table type I should be trying, but I’ve tried Intel and EFI GPT on the 1TB drive and neither have found the ExFAT partition. (When I ran the EFI GPT scan it hung at about 77% on the deeper scan - but as it had been running for close to 5 days by that point and wasn’t showing anything promising I didn’t restart it). Testdisk has been running under Windows 10, but I could boot to Linux if it will make any difference
- The most crucial files (all the photos I’ve taken in my last 2 years living in the US) were backed up… from the 1tb drive to the 500gb drive. I’ll be devastated if I’ve lost them!
- I guess I have two questions really: 1) is there anything different I should try to restore the partitions, or are they likely to be too far gone? and 2) assuming partition recovery is unlikely, how can I go about recovering files, given there’s no partition there at the moment? I have a new 2tb hard drive on the way and my intention is to clone the drives before trying any data recovery.
Any advice very gratefully received… I’ve been trying to fix this for over a week now. I've read lots of other threads tackling similar problems but none seem to tackle non-NTFS partitions. If I could go back in time and break my fingers before I typed ‘diskpart’ I would!!