Harddisk appears as local disk

Slartybart said:

You were on the right track in the beginning with the Ubuntu boot - not sure about PartWiz though, it's a different beast. Since you have a "dead" external, you have a great opportunity to play with Testdisk trying to ressurect your drive. Remember, you can do all sorts of scenarios before that write command finalizes your decisions Read up on the Tesdisk site - the documentation is deeper than I originally thought.

Thanks for your help on this one John.

ICit2lol said:

Hum Bill and F5 what a performance I suppose in hindsight it might have been worth doing a TeamViewer session and you could have had a "fiddle" with the thing

I don't make housecalls

What even if they are 5'5" blond shaped like the wait sign in Windows and lying on a beach in a nice red bikini??

Just kidding:)

It would be great to know, when is your cousin coming over again?
or, you just could ask your cousin two questions:
1) what type of OS was on the USB
2) was testdisk on the USB or did it run off your HD

Someone here can work out the bootable USB part. But I think that answers one part of the question, booting to another OS (Linux, Win7, or ????) let Testdisk get around something on your system. It isn't in your BIOS, so it must e something in Windows, software, or devices (drivers) as installed/configured on your machine.

I'm not sure if you're ready to tackle another thread, but at some point it would be a good idea to have folks help you ananlyse it without the focus on SP1 and the ext HD. I now it's up-to-date, so perhaps a little relaxation is in order.

Still backing up? Slow, but you saved your data - that's why you opened this thread, wasn't it.... it was so long ago, I forget

Bill
.

Running TestDisk from a bootable pendrive: I had already mentioned it here.

When this question resurfaced here and seeing the OP's screenshots( where I noticed 6.14-WIP) , I quickly created a bootable MSDOS pendrive using Rufus and the DOS version of TestDisk and ran it and this is how it looks like:



Hard Disk 80 is the Imation 1GB pendrive from which TestDisk runs ( The C drive), Disk 81 is the 320GB Seagate external drive and Disk 82 is the 500GB internal drive in the system. The disks have to be necessarily identified by the capacity.

It is quite obvious that OP's cousin had run it from a Live Linux pendrive and hope that the OP may be able to throw more light on it.

I really have no answer on what is depicted in those screenshots. Test Disk seems to give erratic information when not used properly. For example a FAT 12 partition in the other thread when all the OP had was NTFS.

My interest centered around how the hard disks will look like if run from the DOS version - which I had totally forgotten. From that repeat exercise it is very clear OP's cousin had not used DOS. Now what else could it be, in your opinion?

Bill has already asked the question "What type of OS was on the USB"

Let us wait for the answer.

The suspense is killing me =:>

re: thee representations of the drive. I think Testdisk could have cleaned that up as well, but saving the data was of foremost importance. The drive should be replaced, I'm sure Seagate will do the right thing.

re: USB boot. stoleaway's cousin is the only one who can answer that. The two screens are clearly Windows, so I think they are before and after snaps-I don't think they were captured as part of the USB boot, run test disk process - could be wrong though.

stoleaway is working more hours on the job and is probably taking a well deserved rest after this marathon thread.

If I didn't say it before, thanks everyone..

Bill
...and I'm out (again?)