Drive became Unallocated and not having much luck recoverying

I don't believe it.
At 100% it showed 65666 files found and Directories : 0 starts, 812 conts.
When it finished I get nothing!!

After backing up sector 2048. Testdisk > BackupBS I can see the the table is the same as what I backed up
you can see from the comparison that they were the same but I rebooted all the same - unfortunately Lady Luck is on holiday in the Bahamas drinking pink champagne and laughing.

Thanks very much for your tireless efforts. I am going to check out maybe one or two data recovery programs just to see if anything recovers more than photorec. I will then format and put it all down to bad experience.

Very disappointing. The results tally with what PRW listed - nothing, except there is an NTFS bootsector

It is now beyond my comprehension. I am just wondering what could have happened and how it could have happened..

You are now free to try whatever you want.

Regarding sector 63 old versions of partitioning/formatting software placed the the first NTFS boot sector at 63. Windows 7 Disk Management and newer versions of other partitioning software place it at Sector 2048.

At the time I wrote this thread diskpart clean zeros LBA 0 to LBA 2047 even PW started the first partition at 63. Now 2048.

My system which was formatted more than five years ago has the first partition starting at 63.

Oh yes, Bahamas is a nice place to vacation. Join lady luck there and enjoy.



Is it her in the Bahamas? :)

Well what can you do.

I have a couple of theories perhaps on how it happened.

1) I may have turned off the drive when without disconnecting safely however, I discounted this as I don't remember writing to it .. but it's a possibility and I do remember looking at the drive not too long ago.

2) Whilst using photorec on a second run the external drive suddenly disconnected and reconnected. This was on the 19th and is recorded on in the SMART data :

1,Raw Read Error Rate,51,200,200,OK,3,0,Enabled
199,Ultra ATA CRC Error Count,0,200,200,OK (Always passing),1,0,Enabled

I ended up with the above - and HD sentinal shows this happening on the 19th June - so I know it was due to that.

This kind of stoppage is pretty rare but I may suspect a usb 3.0 card Asus U3S6 which I have installed as being the culprit. I've had disconnects before on occasion but very very rare. (My motherboard is old enough not to have USB 3 so this is why that card was added). The SATA part of the card has caused no end of trouble that I had do stop using it.

So it's possible that at some point maybe this might be responsible but again logically I don't see it as I didn't write to the drive. Haven't for some time.

It's concerning though because I've never had this happen ever to me.

When I've reformatted I will test the drive thoroughly with the Western Digital Diagnostic tool to see if it detects anything. I appears healthy according to HD Sentinal

Sector 63 - yes this all makes sense as the WD Drive is a blue version which I installed at least 5 years back and when I had XP

Lady Luck: Oh yes I think that is her although she's feigning sadness for the camera.


And again thank you for your efforts and all who have tried to help. I appreciate it so much.

I think I may be getting to the core of the problem.

I decided to do an extended test with WD Lifeguard diagnostics. Shortly into the test it came up with too many bad sectors and aborted.

I ran it again and it got almost halfway through about 70 mins before it again aborted.

Coupled with the random disconnects I think this is a problem either with the external enclosure or the controller but I don't know which. It appears to be the root cause of the problem though.

I have plugged into USB 2.0 to do the test and I'm betting it will pass although the time is going to be 8 hours instead of 2.

If this is a USB 3 problem I'm damned if I can figure out how to know if it's the controller or the enclosure and yet the Hitachi drive seems to work ok on it.

Your drive is a Western Digital Internal drive put inside a third party enclosure I presume..The Hard Disk Sentinel monitor in post #3 was showing 100% health. Reason why I never doubted its integrity ( I use Hard Disk Sentinel too which keeps monitoring the health of my Mini-PC HDD which started off with 90% health).The WD diagnostics report is therefore surprising.

Instead of carrying the tests inside the enclosure with USB 2 or USB 3, you may be better off hooking it up as an internal drive and carry the WD Diagnostics. That way you will be doing away with any intervening interfaces.

jumanji said:

Your drive is a Western Digital Internal drive put inside a third party enclosure I presume..The Hard Disk Sentinel monitor in post #3 was showing 100% health. Reason why I never doubted its integrity ( I use Hard Disk Sentinel too which keeps monitoring the health of my Mini-PC HDD which started off with 90% health).The WD diagnostics report is therefore surprising.

Instead of carrying the tests inside the enclosure with USB 2 or USB 3, you may be better off hooking it up as an internal drive and carry the WD Diagnostics. That way you will be doing away with any intervening interfaces.

I agree and that would have been next but it has passed the extended test without any problems on the USB 2.

I am tempted to see if the Hitachi will pass on USB 3 since I'm not having the same problems with that. I'm sure I've seen some other forum complaints about WD drives having issues with USB 3.

It's not good if I can't trust this interface. USB 2 is very slow and the box doesn't have a SATA interface and I don't have another USB 3 enclosure to test it against to see if the controller is the problem. It's a bit of a pain.

OK, so in the final analysis using the drive +enclosure on USB 3 seems to be the cause for all your woes. And yes you have to find out whether it is the drive or enclosure that does not like USB 3.

In any case you can hook up the WD drive as an internal drive and check whether all your data is there and can be retrieved..

jumanji said:

OK, so in the final analysis using the drive +enclosure on USB 3 seems to be the cause for all your woes. And yes you have to find out whether it is the drive or enclosure that does not like USB 3.

In any case you can hook up the WD drive as an internal drive and check whether all your data is there and can be retrieved..

Yes I did that for the 1st photorec session so at least I know that this was not much different where recovery is concerned.

I've just taken the enclosure apart mainly because I had a new fan to put in to replace a noisy one. I made a note of the chipset so I'll do a bit of research. Jmicron as I suspected. I had a sata enclosure with a jmicron chip which had data problems and the rectification was to remove a particular resistor, which I did - it sorted the problem. I wonder if these things are plaqued with similar problems on their USB interface?