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Missing partitions/partition table?

984 views 1 reply 2 participants last post by  xpert71 
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Alright, so, I've got a WD MyBook 500GB external drive from a few years back, with the USB/FireWire/eSata interface. A while back, all of my OS'es and devices became unable to read any data or recognize any of the partitions. I've got it split up into a ~400GB FAT32 partition, and a ~100GB HFS+ partition which I used for Time Machine backups (back when I still had a functioning Macbook).

Last year, I was able to use PhotoRec to recover all of my critical files from the FAT32 partition. What I'd like to do is resurrect the drive so I can use it again, but I've hit something of a wall. I've fooled around in TestDisk a bit, but can't seem to get anywhere. When I select the drive, the only way I can get any partition to show up in the list is if I select 'None' for the partition table type, and even then, it only detects the FAT32 partition. Selecting Intel or Mac yields nothing, and selecting 'None' doesn't seem to leave me with any repair/recovery options that I can figure out.

My main objective, as I said, would be to get the drive in a usable state again. If I can preserve the data that's on there, that would be a huge plus (as there's some odds and ends I didn't pull when I did recovery last year) but it's not a top priority, I guess.

I'm not entirely sure what the procedure here is, I've done a lot of searching and digging but can't seem to find anyone else that's encountered a problem quite like mine. If anyone can point me in the direction of how to start attacking something like this, I'd be happy to go through the steps and post up a log file from TestDisk, but I'm not sure the ones I have right now would be relevant or useful. I'm sure I've probably left some piece of crucial info out here, so let me know and I can fill in any blanks.

Thanks!
 
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