Recovering vanished partitions.

[jtr1962]

I was working in Windows 7 today when I suddenly had no access at all to my 200 GB Maxtor drive. I have four partitions on this drive-an XP boot partition, and 3 data partitions. In truth, I have backups of probably nearly everything but I would like to try to restore my partitions if possible. I tried testdisk but it couldn't find the boot sector information for my boot partition. Of the three data partitions which were restored, only one is now seen in Windows 7. The other two have an unreadable file system according to testdisk. I tried photorec but it's not recovering the directory structure or original filenames. I'm just getting a bunch of files with nonsense names in the same folder. Are there any better tools?

It appears for some reason I lost my partition data but I would imagine the filesystem info is intact, so in theory I should be able to recovery my files. The drive doesn't appear to have any mechanical issues. Photorec and testdisk both read from it just fine.

 

[Chewy509]

Sounds like you just lost the first sector, and just restoring the MBR with partition information is enough to get the disk back. (If however the on disk filesystem structures have been overwritten then backups are your easiest and best option).

Was the disk using MBR or GPT partitioning? (GPT is easy to fix manually, as it has multiple copies of the partition table on disk, but MBR you just need to locate the first sector of the partition, and manually program in the partition tables).

If you can get access to some disk forensic tools, these have the necessary functions to carve the disk for you. Try either gpart or FTK. More tools are here: http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Tools

 

[jtr1962]

It's MBR partitioning. The good news is I deep scanned using testdisk, and found what were the parameters of my original partitions. For some reason, the partition table had the boot partition overlapping the second partition. I deleted the incorrect first partition, then added a new first partition with the correct parameters. When I rebooted I had my boot partition and my largest data partition back, in addition to the small swap partition I had recovered the first time around. That only leaves the last 32 GB partition where for some reason the filesystem got screwed up. I already have up to date backups of most directories on that partition so I didn't lose anything important. I may have lost a folder containing some downloaded software but knowing me I probably backed that up somewhere.

I still would like to try to recover that partition just for the heck of it. At this point it's more of a directory structure recovery than a MBR recovery. I also backed up the MBR so I can use testdisk to restore it if this happens again.

I have no reason why this happened. I was booting into my old XP install a lot the last few days because that's the only way I can use my microcontroller programmer. Maybe all that thrashing on a ~9 year old disk caused this? Anyway, in the near time I'll probably get a 250+ GB SSD and use that for the same purpose I was using the 200 GB Maxtor. Booting from an old hard disk is a frustratingly long experience. In them meantime I just made backups of the main data partition, and I'm imaging the boot partition now using Disk2vhd.

 

[Bozo]

Have you tried booting from Linux on a cd to see if it can find the partitions and files?
Don't know how well this program works, but they have a free edition.

 

[jtr1962]

Have you tried booting from Linux on a cd to see if it can find the partitions and files?
Don't know how well this program works, but they have a free edition.

The partitions are there, along with all the files except on the last data partition. I'll try the software you linked to. I could also try booting into Ubuntu to see if that works. In all honestly, I'm not spending much time on this because I already have most of the disk back. It's more an academic exercise at this point.

 

[jtr1962]

OK, I just got back my last partition. I put in one of the sets of parameters I obtained from the earlier deep scan. Everything seems to be there on all three partitions.

Just for reference, Recuva only works if Windows can read the partition. It seems to be mainly to recover accidentally deleted files.