Lost my partition after removing 3TB hard drive from enclosure

[professorman]

I have a Seagate 3TB Go Flex hard drive that I recently started using. I intended to use it as an internal drive, but I had to order a Sata cable and connectors from online.

I now pull apart my system and installed the drive internally. When I start my computer, the drive is missing. I go into Disk Management to check out whats going on, and a message pops up asking me to initialize my drive. I choose GPT. It then shows up as unallocated. I have restarted several times and it still comes back the same.

Is there any way I can recover my data from the drive? My partition went missing and now it is showing up as unallocated. It appears that I might have to format it to get back a drive letter for it to show up.

I am running Windows 7 x64. This drive was my backup drive, however, I had quite a few 'unbacked up' rare movies and games that were only on this drive.

Any help will be appreciated.

 

[lakedude]

Whoa slow down. The less you write to the drive the better. Do not format!

 

[lakedude]

Sata cables can be less than reliable. Can you put it back the way it was?

If you have not written anything to the drive and if it was working fine before the internal install, all your data should still be there.

If you have written to the drive some of your data is most likely gone but much should still be recoverable.

The more new crap you write the less of your old data will be intact.

You might just need a good solid electrical connection or you might need recovery software depending on the state of the drive.

 

[Nothinman]

First, you should never have initialized the drive the second time. You may still be able to use a recovery tool to find the old partition table and restore it but the more you write to the drive the less chance that has of working.

Second, it's possible the external enclosure was doing some proprietary magic for compatibility with other OSes and removing it from the enclosure removed that layer. Simply putting it back into the enclosure may have restored your data before you initialized the drive.

 

[professorman]

Sata cables can be less than reliable. Can you put it back the way it was?

If you have not written anything to the drive and if it was working fine before the internal install, all your data should still be there.

You might just need a good solid electrical connection or you might need recovery software depending on the state of the drive.

I have now put it back in the enclose. Same problem.

First, you should never have initialized the drive the second time. You may still be able to use a recovery tool to find the old partition table and restore it but the more you write to the drive the less chance that has of working.

Ahh, if only I knew that before. I have not written anything to it, only initialized it.

Now I need to search the web high and low to find a program which can do this.

Do you have any recommendations for free partition table recovery software?

 

[Nothinman]

Ahh, if only I knew that before. I have not written anything to it, only initialized it.

Now I need to search the web high and low to find a program which can do this.

Do you have any recommendations for free partition table recovery software?

I've never tried to recover a GPT volume before, just MBR. With MBR it can be as simple as just recreating the partitions exactly as they were before with something like the fdisk tool from Linux, but I don't know if that applies to GPT as well.

 

[professorman]

I've never tried to recover a GPT volume before, just MBR. With MBR it can be as simple as just recreating the partitions exactly as they were before with something like the fdisk tool from Linux, but I don't know if that applies to GPT as well.

Through my searching, I havent been able to find a recovery method for GPT. I might be out of luck.

 

[lakedude]

I saw something about partition recovery a couple weeks ago but can't find it now, sorry. Don't give up too easy. Just put that drive aside and don't worry about it till you figure it out.

 

[Coup27]

Don't most data recovery programs support RAW recovery? IE recovery from a disk with no partition or file system and the results are presented in folders with files of the same extension?

Failing that all data recovery programs (such as the free Recuva) support recovery from a formatted volume. When you format, you do not actually overwrite the old data (ignoring SSD's and TRIM). You can most likely format and attempt this. This method is independent of the partition style whether that be MBR or GPT.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Is it possible that it was using 4K sectors while in the enclosure, with an MBR partition?

I've heard that they set up those 3TB externals that way, to allow for compatibility with XP (though not with Win7's image backup).

 

[Nothinman]

Through my searching, I havent been able to find a recovery method for GPT. I might be out of luck.

As I said, you might be able to get by using Linux fdisk to just recreate the partition at the exact same starting point as before. At this point it couldn't really hurt anyway.

 

[lakedude]

I'm against any partitioning or formatting at this point. The OP has not tried to use any recovery software and I assure you such a thing exists. I'll find some in a minute...


http://www.partitionguru.com/


Looks like that might do the trick? I've not used it so this is not an endorsement.

 

[murphyc]

I go into Disk Management to check out whats going on, and a message pops up asking me to initialize my drive. I choose GPT. It then shows up as unallocated.

It shows up unallocated because you just obliterated the partition map by initializing it. And the message that popped up did not ask you to initialize, it suggested it because it couldn't read the disk.

I speculate it couldn't read the disk because the GoFlex enclosure presents a logical disk to the OS, not the actual physical block device. Therefore when you removed the physical drive and installed it internally, the OS is not finding the expected GPT. When you created one by initializing, you overwrite necessary information on the disk so that the GoFlex knows how to present that disk as a logical volume to the OS.

Basically, you didn't know what you were doing and compounded the problem with multiple steps to the point of likely data loss.

Is there any way I can recover my data from the drive? My partition went missing and now it is showing up as unallocated. It appears that I might have to format it to get back a drive letter for it to show up.

You probably can't recover the data from the drive because you've initialized it.

I am running Windows 7 x64. This drive was my backup drive, however, I had quite a few 'unbacked up' rare movies and games that were only on this drive.

Sucks but you violated a lot of very basic rules, and as a result this is user induced data loss. You modified the physical location of a disk without a backup. You didn't immediately stop what you were doing when the disk was not recognized by the OS. You clearly lack understanding that initializing, formatting, and partitioning in effect erase a disk, yet you proceeded to initialize the disk.

 

[KingFatty]

Well, I would guess the data is all sitting there nicely. It's just that the drive lost it's table of contents and can't figure out how all the data is laid out. but it's gotta still be there right?

I mean, to actually destroy all the data would have taken a lot of time with the disk overwriting itself, and I don't think that happened, it was just a really quick overwrite of the table of contents, right?

Surely there is some utility that can reverse this process by tediously examining all the data on the drive, and creating a new table of contents?

 

[murphyc]

Well, I would guess the data is all sitting there nicely. It's just that the drive lost it's table of contents and can't figure out how all the data is laid out. but it's gotta still be there right?

A hard drive is like a library of books without covers or table of contents, with every book split into 1-24 pieces, with the pieces stored non-continguously throughout the library. The only way to make any meaning of the pieces, is with the card catalog. By repartitioning the disk, the location of the card catalog is unknown. By formatting the disk, the cart catalog is destroyed.

So the answer to your question isn't answerable because the state of the disk isn't known.

I mean, to actually destroy all the data would have taken a lot of time with the disk overwriting itself, and I don't think that happened, it was just a really quick overwrite of the table of contents, right?

Yes. Good luck recreating the card catalog by hand. It would take days, weeks, or months. It's vastly faster to just blow away the drive and restore it from backup. Oops, no backup? Well, yer fakaked, and this is why people who know better keep telling people to backup, and ignorant people keep depending on wishful thinking.

Surely there is some utility that can reverse this process by tediously examining all the data on the drive, and creating a new table of contents?

If files are not fragmented, and are recognizable formats, then this should work. Most files are fragmented, and without the "table of contents" or card catalog it is not possible to rejoin the fragments.

Again, this situation is basically user induced data loss. You have a bridge that's 99% intact, except for the last 5 feet, which means it's an utterly useless bridge if you want to drive cars across it. You need the whole thing intact, or it's 0% useful. Just like this hard drive.

 

[murphyc]

A more reliable method of doing this would be to traverse the disk sectors looking for the NTFS header. From that, the starting sector LBA can be determined. I don't know enough about NTFS to know if the ending sector can be determined from the header, if not then the last few hundred sectors of the disk will probably reveal the end of the volume - *shrug*.

That information can be used to create a new GPT with start-end sectors for that NTFS volume, and written to disk.

The thing is, "initializing" typically means writing out a new GPT (partition table) and formatting a new NTFS volume. The GPT only take up a handful of sectors, none of which should be inside the area taken up by the NTFS volume. But the second part, if initializing included creating a new NTFS volume, overwrote portions of the previous filesystem and user data (if the new volume was offset from the original volume), invariably rendering it next to useless.

Seriously, users just need to backup. If you don't backup old movies, then you didn't really care about them that much.

 

[lakedude]

Check this out:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2268049

FIXED!! - Lost partition after power outage, need advice

Anybody telling you that you are screwed is wrong. It might take a while but you should be able to recover most or all of your data. Even if the drive is completely screwed there are still ways (but they might not be time or cost effective).

 

[devfaulter]

So the same thing happened to me - I removed a 3TB Seagate from its enclosure as its USB3.0 port had come away from the USB-SATA circuit board and after I'd unsuccessfully attempted to solder it back on.

I was unable to read the NTFS formatted drive when I attached it directly to my PC in any way, neither under Linux nor Windows, so I feared that the circuit board had encrypted the data as has been suggested in some forums. So I was about to write off my data as lost forever.

Then I was happy to discover that the free "TestDisk" utility was able to read the all my files from the harddisk AND retain the directory structure. This page helped me along the way: https://mypkb.wordpress.com/2007/03...ctively-convert-dynamic-disks-to-basic-disks/

I'll bet that these so-called "professional" outfits that charge shed-loads of money to recover data are really just just using these free utilities and applying a bit of basic Linux knowledge.

 

[C1]

Ya, a similar thing just happened to me too.

Spent lots of time trying different recovery tools. (Most of any free ones are gonna be "trial only" and limit any recovery to 1Gb at best.)

Was able to recover the drive fully using the completely free "TESTDISK". It can be a bit complicated to use. Here's one tutorial: http://html5.litten.com/how-to-fix-external-disk-drive-suddenly-became-raw/

Apparently, there is a "backup MFT" on drives & when I restored that with "TESTDISK" , everything came back flawlessly (ie, all previously known data there with no issues of any sort).

As you've been advised though, DO NOT WRITE TO THE DRIVE IN ANY WAY UNTIL REPAIRED !!!!!!
(I knew enough to not write anything, so I got a perfect recovery.)

Good luck.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download