On 16/02/2014 15:29, Paul wrote:
Jim wrote:
Any suggestions for a decent app to recover lost partitions?

There are "two levels of lost".

If the MBR is damaged or overwritten, then the individual
partitions can no longer be found. For that, you use TestDisk.

TestDisk computes new values for the partition table, based
on the file system headers it finds. The method is problematic,
in that a deleted partition can be relocated. And, the tool
doesn't necessarily check for or detect overlap in the
definition of partitions. It's up to the human operator,
to judge whether the new, proposed, MBR value is any good.
So in a sense, it's far from fool proof. You have to eyeball
the results, and decide whether "the disk originally had
two partitions, a small one and a big one".

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

At the next level, is Disk Management shows the partitions
OK, but one of the partitions doesn't have any type information.
Perhaps the partition will no longer mount. In that case,
you need something to recover the partition.

The only free one I know of, with initial NTFS support,
is Drive Rescue. Which is ancient.

http://web.archive.org/web/200701010...rescue19d.html


This is a screen shot of Drive Rescue at work.

http://imageshack.us/a/img822/1299/evie.gif

*******

For forensic work, you need two hard drives. One
hard drive, holds an exact sector-by-sector copy
of the damaged disk. The second spare hard drive,
is where DriveRescue is going to save the recovered
files.

*******

There are many $39.95 recovery softwares. And
some of them are designed to show the file names,
as a teaser, to prove the tool can find them.
(That's the "trial mode" of the product.)
You then pay your $39.95, and see whether the tool
actually works and can recover them. I have no
experience with any of these, because I don't
have N * $39.95 to waste :-)

Good luck,
Paul
Hi guys thanks for your replies so far i'm in a real pickle here.
The drive is a new WD3TB Black, however it is only showing up in recover
software as 747GB, i need it to be able to show me what is on the whole
3TB drive any idea folks?
I love these fat drives but when you loose em it's a nightmare.

Jim