RDN

I have a 500 GB Seagate disk in an external enclosure connected by USB cable to a USB 2.0 port on my Acer lap top PC. The disk is partitioned into 3 drives. They are labelled F:, G: and H:, but in "My Computer", I can see only F: and H:.

Below is a picture of the Disk Management window.

The first partition of USB disk 'Disk 1' should be "Multimedia, Downloads (G: )", but now it has no drive letter displayed. When I right click on that partition, Disk Management displays merely "Help", there are no other options like "Change Drive Letter and Paths" or "Properties".



I have an identical drive which I use as a backup of the first one and is not normally connected to the system. When I connect it and power it up, the Disk Management window is as shown below.



It looks like the drive that should be drive J: (the first partition of USB disk 'Disk 2'), is given the drive letter "G:". Normally, this partition on 'Disk 2' is labelled "Copy of G: (J: )".

I note that the drive missing from "My Computer" (the drive labelled "Multimedia, Downloads") is indicated as "EISA Configuration". I don't know what this means, but I don't think it should be there.


I have read the thread 'Have you "lost" a hard drive, partition or files in your computer?' and have downloaded "TestDisk". It is running now. It is about 20% done after 3 1/4 hours.

What TestDisk displayed was slightly different from the pictures shown in the "stickied" thread and I would like to ask about it. But as TestDisk will probably not finish for another 15 hours or so, I would like to know if it is safe to stop it.

In the window that is running now, there is the word "STOP" at the bottom:



Do I just press "Enter" to make it stop and is it safe to stop it?

Once I can re-run TestDisk I'll post pictures of the windows that I see. My apologies for not taking accurate notes of what I saw when I ran it.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Deleted090308

Just close TestDisk - nothing bad will happen.

The EISA configuration on the external HDD is, of course, incorrect.
Such partitions are used for recovery data on brand computers (HP, Dell etc).

What is the last "black" partition on the "bad" HDD? If it's empty >> delete it.

Disconnect Disk 2 - then run TestDisk again.

A. At the first window, select “No Log” and press the <Enter> key.
B. Select which drive to analyse, choose “Proceed” and <Enter>.
C. Select partition type – Intel if it’s a PC then <Enter>.
D. Choose Advanced > press <Enter>.
E. Choose Boot > press <Enter>.
New screen - please post back with a screenshot.

RDN

Hi eneles - thanks for your post. I hope you can do for me what you have done for so many other people on this forum. I'm very glad to have your support.

Regarding the last "black" partition, according to "Computer Management/Disk Management", it is one megabyte of unallocated space. I formatted and partitioned both disks exactly the same way: I specified 200 MB (200,000/1024=195.3125 GB) for the first two partitions, and specified the rest of the space for the 3rd partition.

I can't remember which physical disk I partitioned first. So maybe I did the other disk first and made the partitions on this disk ('Disk 1') exactly the same size. So maybe this disk is marginally bigger and therefore has the extra bit of unallocated space.

As it is unallocated and is therefore not a partition, I'll leave it alone. I hope that's OK.

I'll now do the TestDisk work and post the screen shot.

RDN

Hi eneles,

I didn't get a [ Boot ] option when highlighting the first partition, but did on the other two:

Deleted090308

This is a bit confusing - to say the least.

Compaq diagnostics??? You have an ACER, correct???

"Something" has made a mess of the MBR, and possibly the MFT too.

The best option/solution, IMHO, is to make sure the data is OK on the second, unaffected, ext. HDD.
Then format the bad drive and copy everything again.

RDN

Hi eneles - Oh. I guess that's not the response I was hoping for.

Yes, it's an Acer. Here's the full story as much as I can remember:

I had a problem creating an image of my C: drive. I make these image backups regularly and decided to do another one a few days ago. I discovered that two of my "Acronis" bootable backup CDs would not boot. I have 4 copies, so decided to make another two. So I burned an ISO image of the Acronis s/w to a cheap "Princo" CD. This CD would not boot also. I repeated the process to another CD with the same result.

I then used a better quality CD and it booted OK. To make sure the CD was OK, I clicked on "Restore" and browsed to my Image backups directory. I then exited the program thinking I hadn't done anything to drive C:. BIG mistake!

Drive C: would not boot. I hunted around and found a CD I had called "Bart's PE" which had a few utilities on it. I booted it and used it to do a chkdsk of drive C:. Unfortunately, the drive C: that it found was my drive G:. (The drive letters in the environment of Bart's PE were clearly not the same that Windows finds.)

So this chkdsk was taking for ever to complete and I wanted to stop it. I couldn't find any way of stopping it so I pulled the USB connector from my PC. This is probably when the damage was done to drive G:

I then used another CD called "Ultimate Boot CD" to try to boot my C: drive. Eventually I succeeded by using one of the "Boot" utilities on the CD. After booting the C: drive all seemed OK until I noticed that drive G: on my USB drive was "missing".

After rebooting my PC several times using the "Ultimate Boot CD", I tried to boot it normally, and to my surprise the C: drive did - and has continued - to boot normally. I have no idea why the C: drive managed to "fix" itself.

So now I'm left with the missing G: drive.

In the first screen shot I posted of the TestDisk window, there were errors reported concerning incorrect number of heads/cylinder and sectors/track. Is there anything that can be done to fix these errors as a way of getting the disk recognised.

I know it's a "long shot", but I really don't want to lose about two months worth of photographs.

Also, if I do have to reformat, if I re-partition exactly the same way as before do you think there's a utility that may be able to find the original files on the drive?

Deleted090308

Try mounting the "bad" G: drive with FindAndMount.

If that works - copy the files to another HDD.
Then delete all partitions on Disk 1 and reformat.

RDN

Hi eneles,

THANK YOU!!!! FindAndMount did the trick! Thank you so much for the link. Sorry I haven't replied for a couple of days, but I've been busy copying all my newly found files from the newly mounted partition on my corrupt disk to my backup disk. I will then change the drive letters of the partitions on the backup disk so that it looks like the normal disk.

Before I do that and finally give up on rescuing the corrupt disk, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the following idea...

The backup disk, which was identical to the normal (but corrupted) disk has the following partition structure according to "TestDisk":




If I run Test_Disk on the corrupt disk, and then let Test_Disk perform the [Quick Search], it displays the following partition structure:




I noticed that TestDisk has the ability to "Change Disk Geometry" and was wondering if I could use that to change the number of heads and number of sectors per track.

As I now have a good backup disk (although it has the wrong drive letters assigned to the partitions), I was feeling fairly comfortable in giving it a try on the corrupt disk, since the only other thing I can do with it is to re-format it and re-partition it as my "new" backup drive.

Any thoughts on this?

Once again, thanks for getting me this far - no lost data!!

Deleted090308

I'm glad you got your data back.

You could try changing the geometry, but I doubt it'll work.
Disconnect the "good" drive to prevent mistakes.

Then write a standard MBR:
A. At the first window, select “No Log” and press the <Enter> key.
B. Select which drive to analyse, choose “Proceed” and <Enter>.
C. Select partition type – Intel if it’s a PC then <Enter>.
D. Choose MBR Code > press <Enter>.
E. Press Y and continue.

Close TD and reboot.

TestDisk again:
In options - change "Expert mode" to "Yes".
In geometry:
Change the number of sectors per track to 63.
Change the number of heads to 255.

Close TD and reboot.

RDN

Hi eneles,

I'm afraid you were right - I couldn't get the drive to work even after changing the geometry and doing a bit more "fiddling".

Still, I have the backup working now as my original drive - had to change all the drive letters around but that was simple enough. So I'm pretty happy.

Tomorrow I'll format and re-partition the bad drive (without the good one switched on ) and then copy all the data back over to it. That'll keep me busy for a few days.

Thanks again for all your help.

Deleted090308

You're welcome.

RDN

Just to complete this thread, I'll post what I finally had to do to get my disk working normally again.

I used Administrative Tools / Computer Management / Disk Management to delete the two working partitions on my faulty disk. I ended up with a huge amount of unallocated space.

However, I could not delete the faulty partition. The only option available when right clicking on that partition was "Help". There was no "Delete Partition" option.

So I took a chance and ran up TestDisk_win, selected "No log" and then selected the 500 GB drive.

I then selected "Intel" and then "Delete", which deletes all data in the partition table by writing zeroes to it.

After doing that, I restarted the PC and ran up Disk Management again and the faulty partition was gone and I had my 500 GB of unallocated space back again.

The rest was easy - created three partitions exactly the same as my normal disk, gave them the drive letters I:, J: & K: and I've just about finished copying all the data from the normal 3 drives to these newly created backup drives.

The only problem I had was in getting rid of a large (2 GB) directory in the System Volume Information folder in each of the 3 drives I just created. I think the problem was that I had forgotten to turn off monitoring for those drives, so System Restore was saving stuff in there.

But even after I turned off System Restore on all drives, and then turned it back on again (for only the C drive), the huge folder was still present on each drive and I did not have access rights to them.

So I Googled around and found this command to give me the necessary permissions:

cacls "driveletter:\System Volume Information" /E /G username:F

The MS support page is here: http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q309531

So after using that command for all 3 drives I could get rid of the folder and empty the Recycle bin.

Now both of my 500 GB disks have identical drives and identical free space.

Hopefully, this really is the end of the story. (and no data lost! )

Deleted090308

Thanks for sharing the last steps of the solution.