Urgent help needed - Restoring drive

[STRBramley]

I was just formatting a USB stick to make it bootable when I accidentally selected the wrong drive letter and formatted my 3tb harddrive (which was full )

I have managed to get 2TB back using testdisk, but I am missing 1tb work of data because I don't think testdisk can recover over 2tb.

Anyone know of any software I could use? I'm searching at the moment but any extra help would be great..

Thanks,
STRBramley

 

[realnumber 1]

Ouch lol.

Try this http://www.piriform.com/recuva

 

[STRBramley]

Ouch lol.

Try this http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Thanks but I think my problem isn't with data lost, but more the fact that the drive was changed to FAT32 and now when I converted it back to NTFS it only shows up as 2tb and 1tb is missing. I need a tool like testdisk with works with 2tb+ harddrives.

 

[STRBramley]

BTW recuva says "unable to read MFT"

 

[realnumber 1]

Whats the size show up as in disk management? Try doing a quick format and putting it to NTFS again. If it shows as 3TB after that then the above should work.

 

[STRBramley]

Whats the size show up as in disk management? Try doing a quick format and putting it to NTFS again. If it shows as 3TB after that then the above should work.

Shows as 2048GB NTFS and 746.49GB Unallocated

If I format it though I risk losing the 2tb that isn't lost.

 

[realnumber 1]

There you have it then!
Do a quick format on the unallocated partition and then use the above to scan it. If that fails dackup what you need and reformat the full disk and try it.

 

[STRBramley]

There isn't an option to do so.



I think its because I formatted it to mbr which can't go above 2tb and I should have used gpt. But I don't know how to get back to gpt.

 

[STRBramley]

Once I can get it to GPT then I can expand the volume to the unallocated space. I just don't know how.

 

[STRBramley]

Ok so I have managed to convert the drive to GPT using gptgen.exe and I have extended the drive to the full 3tb.

Now I need to recover the files which are listed as 0bytes.

 

[realnumber 1]

Have you tried Recuva? I don't think you will recover 0byte files though.

 

[STRBramley]

Have you tried Recuva? I don't think you will recover 0byte files though.

It still says "Unable to read MFT".

 

[Rob182]

does windows 7 still use fdisk?

if so use fdisk to repartition the disk then try and restore,

remember not to overwrite any files to that drive as you will not be about to restore!

Also have you tried Handy Recovery?

 

[STRBramley]

does windows 7 still use fdisk?

if so use fdisk to repartition the disk then try and restore,

remember not to overwrite any files to that drive as you will not be about to restore!

Also have you tried Handy Recovery?

Going to try Handy now. I don't want to format as I've recovered 2tb and I don't want to risk that.

 

[STRBramley]

Handy gives error "ERROR: err113: Can't read boot sector(NTFS). err=0x57."

 

[realnumber 1]

Read your PM!!

 

[STRBramley]

PM'ed

 

[STRBramley]

Basically what I have lost is all of the files which I put on since I got my 3tb. Everything I transferred from my 1+2tb hdds is still there

 

[STRBramley]

Photorec is Recovering all my files now. It will take 15 hours and they have files names such as 'f0321802'.

Going to be interesting putting all of the files back into their folders.

 

[STRBramley]

Will now take 35 hours :S