Need help recovering hard drive

F

FireStormGS

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 24, 2001
Messages
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I was rearranging some cables in my case today and when I booted the system up windows is now saying I need to format one of my secondary drives? It looks like it can't read the file system on the drive anymore. Is there any way to recover my files?
 
I've tried a couple partition recovery programs but they say they can't find a logical drive. All though these were only demos, maybe someone can recommend a good partition recovery program?
 
TestDisk is the only "free" software I'd recommend, but it's not a simple point-click-fix thing, it's a bit more complicated in some respects, but incredibly powerful stuff.
 
That program is only finding some 32mb partition on a 1tb drive. I think it's gone...
 
Did you check the cables? You might have a loose or damaged one. Logic says the drive would just not work at all, but it's worth taking a second look at.

Also make sure he drives are plugged into the exact same ports as you originally had them, I've actually seen some issues with drive "orders."
 
HDDGURU - Partition-Find-and-Mount

http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2007.05.25-Partition-Find-and-Mount/

Although, a drive reporting the wrong size is not a good sign. I'm inclined to give your chance of success fairly low probability. This is likely an issue with the firmware, which can neither be flashed like a motherboard or manipulated easily in general. A good bit of advice would be that if you are very concerned about the data, don't get to crazy trying to recover it, you may do more harm than good. If you aren't going to die if this data is lost, than you have nothing to loose and you can try some recovery without much risk of actually destroying the data yourself.
 
The cable connections are fine, and the drive is doing the exact same thing in the family computer as well, reporting as 32mb, so I'm doubting changing the cable locations is going to help. I'll try this other program next.
 
So i got the samsung hard drive utility downloaded and ran it from a usb boot drive. The drive passed all the tests. And when I go under partion info there is a 1tb nonactive partition. The lba for the drive is set wrong currently. I don't see any options to make the partition active though.

Will recovering the native lba effectively format the drive as well? Or is there a chance it will restore it with data?

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/ES_Tool.html
 
For those interested I reset the LBA using samsungs hard drive utility and my drive reappeared in windows with apparently no lose of data.
 
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