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Recover a GPT Partition that became RAW in 3T Internal HDD
Hello everybody
I've been following this forum for many years and already "saved" me a few times in the past, but despite already are a few similar threads where this subject/topic was covered or treated, my case is slightly different from the one's i saw.
I am talking about a couple of topics opened on this forum in the past:
External HDD suddenly requires formatting, read as RAW instead of ntfs
and
4TB Seagate drive in enclosure suddenly became RAW
I have read them carefully and after trying to follow all the steps/options described there, i wasn't able to recover my partition and ofc it led me to open this new thread instead of revive one of the older ones.
My Problem:
One of the partitions of my secondary HDD (Toshiba P300 3T) became RAW. I would like to recover the partition again without or with minimum data loss.
Facts and Figures:
I have a Desktop PC with an ASUS P6X58D-E motherboard.
I have the Win7 X64 running on a Samsung 500G SSD drive and then I have 3 additional internal SATA drives for backup and storage. Of these last three, two drives have 1T of space and another 3T drive which is the target of this problem.
What happened was that about a month ago I bought a new SSD disk to improve the performance of my desktop. To install it, i've unplugged all the other HDDs from the board, connected my new ssd, made a fresh install of the Win7 x64, all the drivers etc... all good. Then after that i plugged all my secondary internal SATA discs again and the system recognized them all without problem with all their partitions looking and working ok in all the drives.
Suddently, about a week ago, the Toshiba P300 3T HDD saw one of its three partitions became RAW. I can't precise exactly what i was doing. Just noticed it randomly, when i've tryed to access a few documents and the message "You need to format H:" appeared. I canceled and since then i've been in a hard task to recover my partition.
My suspect is that somehow the PBR from that HDD got corrupted.
When i try to run checkdsk (without any options /f /r...) it returns this message:
"The type of file system is NTFS.
The first boot sector is unreadable or corrupted
Reading second boot sector instead
Unable to determine the version and volume state. CHKDSK aborted."
After this i read the threads mentioned above and tryed to follow Jumanji steps but i got no lucky because there are a few things different and i am afraid to loose all the data if i make a wrong move or decision.
SMART test says all is good. No bad secctors on HDD. HDTune Pro info about the drive says its all physically good.
Strange things:
+ In windows disk manager the HDD show all the drive with it's correct size (3T) and all the 3 partitions of that drive with its correct sizes (each of 1T).
+ Other disc manager tools like Easus Partition Manager, Mini Tools Partition Wizard, AOMEI partition Assistant return wrong sizes of disc/partition.
+ Testdisk 7.1 and Bootice also don't recognize the full capacity of this drive. So i am afraid to use them.
+ WinHex shows the two first sector of the drive filled with 00 and gives a strange warning message.
+ Easeus data recovery can detect the partition and lots of data but everything is a mess and the folder structure is gone. Not all the documents i look for are there too, or have wrong names and/or sizes.
I dunno what to do next and feel exhausted with this situation.
It's important for me to fix this for 2 reasons. First i want my data back as there are very important things that i need to get back. Second, i would like to know what happened to prevent this from happening again.
I am going to attach a few images of some tests i already did. I havent tryed to write or use that partition anymore since the problem occur.
Thanks in advance for any help!
RFG
Last edited by RFG; 30 Mar 2019 at 21:40.
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