How to access a drive that is a GPT protected partition?

[evident]

My uncle brought me over his desktop, which is a new desktop with an amd a8 and windows 7 (not sure if 32 or 64 bit, but i'm assuming 64 bit since he got this a few months back).

when he boots it up, he's unable to boot from the hard drive, as the bios just says can't boot to hard drive. When i take the drive out and put it into my computer (win 7, 64 bit) to try to recover files, it doesn't show up in windows explorer, but shows up as a GPT protected drive (healthy) in administrative tools>storage utility, with no drive letter but just a blank next to the hard drive icon. it seems like i'm unable to do anything on my computer to this drive. wd diagnostics and seagate tools say that the drive is passing smart. I suppose i could just write zeros to it, however my uncle prefers that the data gets recovered and that formatting it should only be a last resort.

i'm curious as to how it got this way? could a virus do something like that to his drive? and also, what should my next course of action be to access this hard drive?

thanks!

 

[Elixer]

Did you look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463525.aspx yet ?

Q. Can Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 read, write, and boot from GPT disks?

A. Yes, all versions can use GPT partitioned disks for data. Booting is only supported for 64-bit editions on UEFI-based systems.

 

[evident]

Did you look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463525.aspx yet ?

Q. Can Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 read, write, and boot from GPT disks?

A. Yes, all versions can use GPT partitioned disks for data. Booting is only supported for 64-bit editions on UEFI-based systems.




yep, as for the quoted, i again can't access anything on this drive at all from my desktop's windows 7 x64, let alone boot from it.

 

[Nothinman]

What happens if you try to assign a drive letter in Disk Management?

 

[evident]

everything is greyed out. the only option i have is to convert to dynamic disk. when i click convert to dynamic disk, i get an error. I currently have the drive in another machine right now that's booting to ultimate boot cd's parted magic linux. In gparted i get an error that says "both the primary and backup gpt tables are corrupt. try making a fresh table and using parted's rescue feature to recover partitions." Looks like i'll try and figure out how to do this now!

does anyone know how something like this happens? is it a virus or is the hard drive bad?

 

[Elixer]

It could be many things, but I doubt it was a virus, unless they frequent sites that love to infect files.

If you want to try and salvage that drive, the best thing is to clone it to another drive, and work on that one.
Then use something like testdisk (free) to try and recover whatever it can.

 

[evident]

well here's an update. I used testdisk and it turns out that the boot record was all hosed up, so i used testdisk to write a new boot record for me. I still wasn't able to boot to the hard drive, but was able to put it in my desktop and recover my uncle's files.

now even though this drive stil has the HP_RECOVERY partition I wasn't able to figure out how to boot to it and some people say that i may need the HP recovery cd's (which kind of defeats the purpose of having the recovery partition, doesn't it?) I deleted the main partition and was able to reinstall windows 7 in efi mode.

 

[AussiePete]

Thaught you could enter HP restore by pressing one of the function keys during boot - usually F6 or F8 - maybe I am stating the bleeding obvious and haven't read all the above posts properly?

 

[nomad247]

Hello All,
I had those problem with my 2 external drives. Here is what I knew.
2 Terabyte drive (protective GPT. Made this originally MBR NTFS
old 350 gig HD, MBR NTFS

Had re-imaged the smaller drive first GPT then re-did it MBR
2 T drive for data storage MBR NTFS
2 T drive for data storage GPT NTFS
What I learned. One using USB 2, One using USB 3. I switched the sata cables and low and behold, I had the same cables I used to make these two drives, and now it does NOT say protective GPT, I can access them both.

 

[Doomer]

Bad cables are usually the last thing people think of when the have a HD problem and bad cables can bite you bad.

 

[nomad247]

They cables were bad, it was just that the 2 t drive was formatted, and data written to it using the USB 3 cables. The other drive was formatted using a USB 2. I jut switched the data cables, did not get any other cables. Just something querky about how each works.

 

[Edward Konowicz]

A friend's laptop failed (W10) and needed the files off of the HD. Using a USB to SATA adapter produced the GPT protective problem. I put the HD in a W7 machine with an internal SATA and the partitions were now available but could not get admin rights to enter the USER folders. So I then put it in a W10 machine (internal SATA). The drive was not detected so I rebooted and amazingly the laptop drive became the prime OS booting into the laptop OS. I had to get the password from the owner, but could then copy files.