Big problem with the registration / boot sector of a 1.5TB external hard drive and doubts with TestDisk

[phrono]

Hello everyone, I'm telling you about a big problem I have, so maybe someone knows what I can do:

I have a 1.5 Tb hard drive in a box that converts it into an external USB drive. I don't know what brand or model it is, because until now I had never had problems with it and I didn't see the need to open it.

The thing is that today I bought another hard drive (a WD Caviar Blue of 250 Gb) to back up the important things it contains and, by the ironies of fate, when I finished installing it and formatting it, when I went to access the 1.5 Tb one it told me that the hard drive was not formatted, if I wanted to format it.

BUT it did show me the folders it contained, although it didn't let me access them.

The thing is that I thought my Windows 7 (x64) had gone a bit crazy when installing new hardware, so I restarted the computer.

You can imagine the look of an idiot I got when, when I clicked on "Computer", the 1.5 Tb drive didn't appear. I tried changing the USB cable in case that was the problem, but no, same result. :wall:

Then I went to "Disk Management" and there I see a window that says:

"Initialize disk" Select a disk so that logical disk management can access it. And then a "Disk 7" and the option to choose MBR (Master Boot Record) or GPT (GUID Partition Table).

Well, when I clicked on MBR (which according to what I've read is what it should have) I got an error message: "Cyclic redundancy check error. I tried doing fdisk, chkdsk, assigning a drive letter... but nothing. :eoh:

Reading around in forums I saw that it's a problem with the boot sector or something like that, and that with a utility called TestDisk and MUCH luck, I could recover my data (very important, if I lose it I'll cut my veins).

The problem is that, once I finish analyzing the partitions or data or whatever it analyzes with this program (it's been about 5 hours and it's not even halfway, remember it's a 1.5 Tera), I have no idea what to do next.

The tutorials out there assume that we all know a lot about computing, partitions and logical disks, they tell you that you will get several partitions and that one of them is the good one, but I have no idea which partition I should keep, or make primary, or delete, etc.

Does anyone know what exactly I have to do to lose the minimum possible data? Or if there is any utility to do this in a less complicated way for idiots like me? :ffu:

And by the way, have I lost my data? Are they still there? What could have happened?

Thanks a lot in advance, if anyone knows anything about the subject, no matter how superficial it seems, I'll be grateful from the bottom of my heart. And if anyone can solve it for me, I'll buy you a coffee and a beer!

Edit: I don't know anything about Linux, nor do I have a Windows 7 boot CD...

[Bm4n]

I don't understand you, the problem you have is with an external data disk, not an OS one, that is, it doesn't have a boot sector. The problem is that the system has stopped recognizing the external disk and doesn't mount it so that you can work with it. There is software that helps you restore the file system, I don't know which one you are using specifically but it's usually not complicated, it tells you if you have to rebuild or repair something, you say yes and it repairs it.

PD. From what I see TestDisk is not one of the easiest to use, you should look for help depending on what you need to do, for example on its wiki: Advanced FAT Repair - CGSecurity But I would almost recommend that you look for another program for Windows with windows and that is something more intuitive, it will be easier for you.

[Franziskaner]

hello phrono have you ever tried to plug in a 1TB hard drive in your pc without the casing, I mention this because something similar happened to me, but what broke was the casing controller not the hard drive and if the controller breaks it will show errors on the hard drive that do not exist.

[phrono]

I'm going to try to take it out of the casing and plug it directly into the pc, to see if the whistle sounds…

I'll comment on how it went :ugly:

Edit: I've taken the disk out of the external casing, plugged it in with its SATA cables (which worked with another disk, they are not damaged or anything) and it has been even worse: now neither Windows nor the BIOS recognize it. I've set it as "use SATA as IDE" and nothing... now I'll try with AHCI, to see how it goes... I'm losing hope. :eoh:

Ah! I already know what model of disk it is: a Western Digital Caviar Green, model WD15EARX

[david88]

@Franziskaner:

hello phrono have you ever tried to poke the one terabyte hard drive in your pc without the casing, I tell you this because something similar happened to me, but what broke was the casing controller not the hard drive and if the controller breaks it will show errors on the hard drive that do not exist.

something similar happened to me and a cousin of mine did this that you say (I would never have thought of it) and it worked ;D;D I hope you have the same luck. :ugly:

[phrono]

Well, after trying many, many things that I've seen on the forums (and trying not to do anything that writes to the disk so as not to spoil the data it saves), I have come to the conclusion that indeed, my last hope is Testdisk, to try to reconstruct the missing partition.

I have it searching for partitions on the disk, but it has been going for about 3 hours and is at 1%, so I imagine it won't finish until in 3 or 4 days... of course, it is analyzing 1.5 terabytes of Kb by Kb...

I hope my data is still there and I can recover it. If not, I am well screwed.

Does anyone control Testdisk? more than anything, in case it finds more than one partition, to know which one I have to recover.