1
My Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB HDD suddenly is unrecognized by Windows 7. It's an external My Book drive, but plugging it vía USB from his case is unrecognized by Windows 7 or Linux, so I have to connect it directly to the Power supply and motherboard. It's so strange, this drive has not had an extensive use (maybe once a month to copy data from this external drive to my desktop internal hdd).
--I must say I formatted it a long time ago because the WD external drives are encrypted by default. So my drive was working properly without any type of encryption and I've used it the last two years without any problems. So I can plug my hdd to the PC without any problem derived to his encryption. And no strange/foreign encryption must be taken into account as far as my problem is concerned.--
Windows 7 can't recognize the hdd from hdd management, neither from recovery programs like Recuva, GetDataBack, Zero Assumption Recovery... It is as if there were no hdd connected to my computer.
GParted can recognize the HDD but the partition is "Unallocated".
fdisk -l /dev/sdc returned
Disk /dev/sdc: 3000.6 GB, 3000592982016 bytes
255 headers, 63 sectors / track, 364801 cylinders, total 5860533168 sectors
Units = 1 sector = 512 bytes * 512
Size (logical / physical) Sector: 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
Size E / S (minimum / optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xb32384ed
The disk / dev / sdc does not contain a valid partition table
parted -l returned
Error: / dev / sdc: unrecognized disk label
Error: Invalid partition table - recursive partition on / dev / sr0.
Discard / Ignore / Cancel / Cancel? I
Model: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-H12N (scsi)
Disk / dev / sr0: 205MB
Size (logical / physical) sector 2048B / 2048B
Partition Table. msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
gdisk returned:
Partition table scan: MBR: not present BSD: not present APM: not present GPT: not present
And TestDisk is now working, by now I selected the GPT Analysis because this program recognize my HDD but is unable to recognize the partition.
TestDisk 7.0-WIP, Data Recovery Utility, October 2014
Disk /dev/sdc - 3000 GB / 2794 GiB - CHS 364801 255 63
Analyse cylinder 105480/364800: 28%
Unknown 140533711 1158650489806 1158509956096 [~O~G^EM-A/^O]
Unknown 867089409 30079211680 29212122272 [~NfѸ
Unknown 1533954453 30124396312777580 30124394778823127
check_FAT: Bad jump in FAT partition
check_FAT: Bad number of sectors per cluster
check_FAT: Bad jump in FAT partition
check_FAT: Bad jump in FAT partition
Unknown 3298695629 529015010252 525716314624 [P^? 0]
What these "unknowns" and "bad number/bad jump" means and what should I do from now? Im'm trying to copy the partition table from the backup to restore it. Because I think the problem is that I've lost the partition table (I don't know why, I've never moved the hdd and I've always taken great care of the drive) but the TestDisk is the only one who can recognize the hdd and he cannot bring me the "restore partition table from backup" option saying "there are no partitions".
I hope someone can help me!! Thanks a lot for your help and time in advance.
JBoY
Posted 2014-10-17T15:52:31.387
Reputation: 11
You can try to create a partition in gparted without formatting. That has worked for me in the past. – Mr. Mascaro – 2014-10-17T15:59:00.917
Thanks a lot for your response @jbarker2160.
But this option creates a new empty partition? so.. data will be lost? Is there a way to know if the entire partition or only the partition table is wrong? – JBoY – 2014-10-17T16:08:12.780
If you don't format the data will still be there unless the file allocation table or equivalent was also deleted. – Mr. Mascaro – 2014-10-17T16:10:33.720
Wow!! I always thought the partition kept somehow the names of the files on disk (something like partition table does), but I'm not an expert. I'll give it a try!
Just for curiosity, what "Unknown" lines means at TestDisk analysis?
Thanks again. – JBoY – 2014-10-17T16:16:51.380