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Laptop Toshiba 500GB crashed NTSF patitions became RAW
I know you want the full steps I took to try and recover my backup. I have a laptop Toshiba 500GB HDD. It has over 5 years of critical business & reseearch data, photos, emails. I accidentally knocked the laptop to the floor. It will not reboot again on an installed windows 7 64 bit operating system.
Window 7 recovery rescue disk would not recognize the drive. I attached it to a desktop running windows 7 using usb external drive enclosure. At first it was making clicking sounds and I got a cyclic redundancy error. I ran WD diagnostics and it passed with no errors. Windows 7 device manager showed no errors. MY COMPUTER showed the disk assigning it a Letter. It then asked me do I want to initialize it with mbr or gpt. I stupidly clicked on mbr. After that, I lost the letter designating the drive in MY COMPUTER. It no longer shows up under MY COMPUTER. Under computer management it shows drive as unallocated. If I right click, it ask for new simple partition. I read where you could do a chkdsk /f but the windows system does not see the drive. It is labeled disk 6 under storage management. I also heard that chkdsk can mess up recovering your files as corrupted files will be in lost clusters or chains. It no longer makes clicking sounds or gives CRC error msg.
Prehaps rebuilding the mbr, I believe a backup mbr is on their somewhere. The problem is that I do have a windows 7 backup. I backup all my drives using windows 7 backup program and created a system image. However the drive has three partitions on it so when I backed up I only backed up the system partition C and data partition D. It has manufacturer factory recovery partition. The backup image is located in the folder called imagedrivebackup on another external drive. I also did a backup image on laptop on Drive D partition. However imagedrivebackup is 6 month old and will not backup on any other clean HDD. It is seeking only the HDD on this laptop. But I cannot back using the imagebackup because the drive is no longer recognized by windows.
So, I downloaded Recuva but recuva did not recognize this drive. So I downloaded Easeus data recovery free. It recognize the drive and I ran the quick scan but it didn't show many documents. So I ran the deep scan and checked the folders where my data was stored. However, I realized that the recovery will no way be able to recover all my data files. So I stopped the program and received a warning that stoping the program may result in not finding further files and it started building a file directory.
The question is that the files are now in raw format. Is there a way to rebuild the partitions using backup MBR that was on there? I have over 200gb of data files, email, photos, docs, video etc. If it recovers them, I am reading that file names will all be messed up.
Is there anyway to rebuild the partition or mbr so that that normal files can be readable? A program out there that will rebuild raw back to ntsf. I tried booting up using UBuntu but it did not recognize the drive. I not familiar with Linux so I might have used the wrong verision or did not know how to search probably. I ran testdrive but was at a lost how to use the program and quit. I'm fearful of overwriting anything on the HDD. The Data is there. I was wondering if Spinrite from GRC would repair the HDD. Not familiar with any other programs. The data is there but in raw format. I can't go through 200gb of data to rename each and everyone of those files. Are there steps to take to convert the partition back to NTFS and recover the file table restructure. Sorry, my English not very good.
Thx for any help!