How to erase 2nd drive's bogus GPT, and restore origional MBR?

[Charlweed]

A buggy drive management tool erased my SECOND (not boot) hard drive's MBR and replaced it with a completely bogus and useless GPT.


My actual partitions should be intact, and I am optimistic that partition recovery tools would be able to find them and restore the original partition table. However, they won't work, as long as the drive is identified as a GPT disk.


How can I erase all traces of GPT so I my recovery tools can rebuild an MBR?


I have MBRWiz, but I am shy about using it, and I have no experience with it, and I fear for my data.

 

[Nomad8459]

I just recently had this issue but with a portable USB HDD that was formatted using WIN XP.

What I did was use my WIN XP to remove all the data from the drive and then followed this post:

How to delete GPT Protective Partition - Paul Gu|blog

Worked like a treat, but this may not be quite the same situation as yours and as that post says, you will lose all the DATA from the drive.

 

[F5ing]

See if testdisk can help you out: CGSecurity

If you can use this before mucking around with the drive too much you'll likely lose no data.

 

[SIW2]

It might help if you let us know which program you used to convert the disk to gpt.

 

[Charlweed]

I got some compensation from the vendor of the "management tool", in exchange for a promise of no public claims that their crappy software is crappy. So I will not. But if the "management/recovery" software does not not explicitly support GPT and UEFI, do not even let it be possible for it to run when you are "managing" your drives.

Please share if you know of robust GPT/UEFI partition recovery software.

 

[kegobeer]

The only tool I've read about that works is Acronis True Image Home 2012 with the plus pack addon. I have no personal experience with it, but I've read a few posts that said it worked.