@ boweasel
I'm just a watcher, jumanji is the expert. I watch many of jumanji post.
You can be assured that jumanji posting using English is excellent. He gives very precise instruction. Take your time reading them. They must be completed precisely as they are stated or you could loose your data.
Where do you live Boweasel? As you can see jumanji lives in India. It would be handy if your flag was under your avatar also.
Full screenshot enclosed after removal of USB connectors for the printer and the speakers.
Done. Extracted to root directory.
I did alter my profile to display my flag. I live in The Eastern Time Zone of the US. My current time is 6:48PM.
And I have an external drive with about 50GB of free space. Should be WAY more than enough to get the pictures, music, favorites, desktop and documents
Last edited by boweasel; 02 Nov 2016 at 20:14.
Hi boweasel,
I see you hanging around here. Good. I have seen your post. You may now go to sleep. When you get up in the morning 6 hours from now you can see my post with instructions. I will also be online mostly after that.
The screenshot below shows my trial 750 GB drive on which I had deliberately made my fourth partition RAW. It has data on it.
I made it RAW by corrupting the Volume Boot Sector ( Partition Boot Sector) of that partition. You may note that it exactly replicates your laptop disk except that your disk has only three partitions and the third partition is RAW. For the present I am assuming that the VBR for that partition has been corrupted. A corrupt MFT also can make the drive RAW. We shall come to know which one is corrupt as we proceed.
For the time being you need not connect another external drive to copy the data from your external 500 GB laptop drive. We shall reserve it for later, in case we are unable to make the boot sector good and restore the drive.
You will now run testdisk_win.exe with your laptop drive USB connected to the tower. Follow the instructions given in the following Screenshots
First Screen:
Second Screen:
Third Screen:
Fourth Screen:
Fifth Screen:
Sixth Screen:
At any point you have any doubt, stop , post the screenshot and close TestDisk by hitting on X in the title bar of TestDisk Window. You can run it again after clarifying such doubts.
Also if you get any screen other than what is shown above, stop, post the screenshot and close TestDisk.
Do not make any assumptions and move forward if in doubt.
There is no need to hurry up things. You can do it at your own pace and time. During my daytime I keep peeping into the forum every now and then ( unless I have gone out on a short errand) and will catch you.
Last edited by jumanji; 03 Nov 2016 at 07:17.
Apparently I am going to require further interaction. Enclosed are snapshots of screens 2, 3 and 5. Obviously screen 5 is the one troubling me, but I've included 2 & 3 simply to ensure that I have (hopefully) followed your directions. Screen 2 had given me some pause since you specifically instructed me not to highlight the obvious choice - drive E:.
After navigating back to screen 2 to take the screenshots I again proceeded. Screen 5 now gives me something different - different but not positive.
Shut down and restart your PC. Run Test Disk again. Post all screenshots 1,2,3,4,and 5 in sequence.
Take the screenshot of each screen before you press Enter and go to next screen. Save it. No going back to take any missed screen.
This is just to confirm and put it in order.
Since your drive gave an I/O error there is more to it than what I have assumed. Let me think about it and decide upon the next course of action if TestDisk still does not find the partitions.
So go ahead repeat and put the screenshots in order. I shall see it tomorrow morning.
Here are the screenshots in order, after rebooting. And FYI, I screwed up on the 2nd run of Test Disk, referenced at the end of my previous post. On Screen 4 I just hit <Enter>, so that last image from post #15 represented Analyze, not Advanced. Sorry.
When I noticed that screen 2 looked different I went back to Explorer, and quickly noticed that drives E: and K: were no longer showing up. Here are the latest Disk Management screens
Yes, I noticed it while going through the screenshots in post #17 ( even before I read your post #18) and my heart missed a beat :). Yes smile and laugh when you are in trouble.
The partitions are lost. The worst has happened. Sector 0 which holds the MBR and partition table has gone bad.
Since the partitions were shown in your first try, TestDisk should have shown all the three partitions in the fifth screen.. But inbetween the second screen which showed your drives E, and K ( meaning the partition table in Sector 0 is intact and readable) and fifth screen which should show the partitions so read , sector 0 had killed itself.
We have lost the race. Please unplug your laptop drive and keep it under rest.
Now you have a decision to make.
1. Clone your drive with ddrescue and attempt data recovery on the cloned drive. Best method/tool for cloning a failing HDD for Data Recovery?
2. Run Photorec on the failing drive and hope to get as much data as possible. You will only get a bunch of files but without the original file name and folder structure. Guide to using PhotoRec recovery software.
EDIT: If you really need the data and can afford to spend, then the best course will be to seek Professional Data Recovery Service rather than trying it yourself.
Last edited by jumanji; 04 Nov 2016 at 00:04.
I unplugged the drive overnight. Today I plugged it back in and the E: and K: drives are back. I went through the Test Disk application again, and it was identical to the first time I ran it - Screen 2 shows the E: and K:. The screenshot is identical to the first image from post 15, Disk Management is identical to the image from post 12. Unfortunately Screen 5 still says 'No Partition Available'. It is identical to the 3rd screen from post 15. I quit the application and checked rechecked 'Computer' and Disk Management. These are the images.
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