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Help Needed with Recovering a Drive

V

vorpel

Limp Gawd
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Jan 7, 2006
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I had two drives in my main system - Hitachi 750G and a Hitachi 1TB and I wanted to consolidate down to 1 drive - a Seagate 1.5TB. The system is running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit and the two HItachi drives are NTFS and I created a new NTFS partition on the 1.5TB drive that was attached via eSata (defaults were taken when creating the partition and quick format was used).

I started moving all the data on the 1TB Hitachi drive to the Seagate 1.5TB drive (about 700G used). The process ran for quite some time (several hours) and when I came back the eSata (1.5TB) drive was showing in Explorer.

I rebooted the system and after not seeing a drive letter for the Seagate. I checked Disk Management and it system wanted to initalize the 1.5TB drive. I told it no, and the drive is showing up as completely unused - no data, no partition. I tried the drive in 2 other systems - same result.

Goal: I want to recover the data that was moved from the 1TB hard drive. I have tried Recover My Files - trying to rescue deleted files. I did the restore to a 2TB drive and most of the data it "recovered" is complete junk. A lot of JPG photos can't be read and MKV video files are completely mislabeled, truncated, and not worth the time to try and sift through. I also tried to discover a missing partition with Recover My Files on the Seagate 1.5TB drive, but it didn't find anything.

From what I've read, the "move" command in Windows 7 is a copy and the erase function. Is there a good program out there that will undo the erase and restore my drive to the content it had right prior to the move command?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

DC
 
You moved the data permanently instead of copying, verifying, then deleting data from the original source? Oh man, that's a mistake you'll probably never make again. Besides trying your luck with Recuva, you're stuck in a very tricky situation. If the 1.5TB eSATA drive is *New* you might have had to not only format it, but right click and "activate" the drive in Disk Manager. I had a similar issue with the new 2TB WD I bought where after I copied everything onto it I got a generic driver update, wiped out all the data I copied. Tried to copy again, when I restarted the data was no longer there. Only through google did I realize these new drives/OS'es you should double check and manually activate it.

I thought this was just a USB thing with new drives, wouldn't think eSATA would do the same thing. I don't know what to tell you. I think it black holed most of my data, but I really didn't try that hard once I finally figured out what it was and since I only used the copy command. To this day I am afraid to take my original 500GB external backup drive offline therefore having my second 2TB external as a backup and backups backup. I will never trust another external again after this happened to me.

Wish you luck man :\
 
Thanks for the reply. Yes, it was stupid to not copy, validate and then delete. Definitely not a mistake I will repeat in the future.

I did "initialize" the 1.5TB drive in Windows 7, then created the partition and formatted the drive. I had run Seatools on the drive as it was a RMA replacement . I did both the short dst and long dst tests...

I'll take a look at Recuva. I just want the best chance of recovering the data if at all possible. The majority of it was video captures that my wife will miss (HGTV and Food Network stuff), but the pictures of my baby I would really like to get back...!

-DC
 
The process ran for quite some time (several hours) and when I came back the eSata (1.5TB) drive was showing in Explorer.
Click to expand...
So it did show up? Were there any files on that drive?

The first thing you should do is a block level copy of the 1.5 TB drive before you try any recovery tool in write mode. You may have a chance to recreate a partition table and get access to the partition.
 
omniscence said:
So it did show up? Were there any files on that drive?

The first thing you should do is a block level copy of the 1.5 TB drive before you try any recovery tool in write mode. You may have a chance to recreate a partition table and get access to the partition.
Click to expand...

This. Image dump is rule #1 first thing to do because you dont know if you'll get another chance to read the same sector if a drive is on its way out.
 
Sorry for the delay in responding back - the little one takes precedence over any of my computer woes...!

Recuva did the best job on the initial source drive where the items where moved off of. I was able to get a good look at exactly what was on the drive and was successful in recovering approx 85% of the photos. Some of the other files I was able to recover, but the photos were the highest priority for me.

I have set the 1.5TB drive aside and will work on it this weekend when I hopefully will have a little bit of time.

As far as doing a block level copy - any suggestions on a program to do this?

Thanks!
 
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