Only able to recover few partitions at a time

Question

Currently recovering a drive that had it's partition table messed up by some malware, and I have been able to successfully recover all of the partitions, just not at the same time. There are three, one is one of those old recovery partitions for vista, another is a 120 gB vista partition, and the last is a 250 gB 7 partition. I can either recover the 7 partition, or the vista and recovery, but not all three. I have tried almost every combination of partition characteristics in testdisk, and none have worked.

Here is an image of how I currently have it:

How can I recover all three?

Answer 1

First, to be completely safe, you should make a block copy of the entire disk. But you do need 500GB of spare space somewhere.

Sectors were originally laid out in an actual Cylinder-Head-Sector geometry (back when drives had several platters, two heads each). That geometry became a fiction a long time ago, but disk partitioning often follows cylinder boundaries anyway. Confusingly, cylinders and heads start counting from zero, but sectors start counting at one.

The problem appears to be that the end of the 120GB overlaps the start of the 250GB that follows. The 120GB ends at C:24552, H:254, S:63. Therefore, the 250GB cannot start at H:171 of the cylinder. More likely, it starts at 24553-0-1, just after.

You could try forcing the 250GB partition to start there and see if that works. If TestDisk doesn't allow this, you might try other programs; as a last resort, the partition table can be edited manually. You would also want to calculate the correct number of blocks/sectors for LBA.