Drive separated into different partitions

[DingdongTP]

So following this post: https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/646198-external-hdd-disconnecting-randomly/ I have taken my drive from it's enclosure, put it it my computer as an internal HDD and booted up. Everything was fine until I went to "This PC" and found out that my drive wasn't being able to be open. I went to disk management to find the drive separated into 3 different partitions, one RAW and 2 unallocated. Now I can't access my data and I don't know what to do to recover the files, can someone please help? Thanks in advance.

 

[ebysamz]

I would recommend trying to run recuva on the drive before trying anything else

[DingdongTP]

7 minutes ago, ebysamz said:

I would recommend trying to run recuva on the drive before trying anything else

I am running at the moment a MiniTool Partition Wizard Professional scan, it does the same job right?

[ebysamz]

19 minutes ago, OvrilPT said:

I am running at the moment a MiniTool Partition Wizard Professional scan, it does the same job right?

I have not heard of this program before, but from a Google search, it seems to be a scan for lost partitions, not just lost files. At this point, you should try to get the files out of the hard drive as soon as possible. If this MiniTool Partition Wizard doesn't work, use recuva because it just scans the whole disk for deleted files.

[DingdongTP]

1 hour ago, ebysamz said:

I have not heard of this program before, but from a Google search, it seems to be a scan for lost partitions, not just lost files. At this point, you should try to get the files out of the hard drive as soon as possible. If this MiniTool Partition Wizard doesn't work, use recuva because it just scans the whole disk for deleted files.

Still waiting for the scan to finish, as it is a 3TB HDD it will take a very long time to scan everything, I'll give an update when it finishes...

[DingdongTP]

5 hours ago, ebysamz said:

I have not heard of this program before, but from a Google search, it seems to be a scan for lost partitions, not just lost files. At this point, you should try to get the files out of the hard drive as soon as possible. If this MiniTool Partition Wizard doesn't work, use recuva because it just scans the whole disk for deleted files.

3 hours ago, OvrilPT said:

Still waiting for the scan to finish, as it is a 3TB HDD it will take a very long time to scan everything, I'll give an update when it finishes...

So the scan finished but it only recognized the RAW partition, not the unallocated ones, which also had files, then I ran Recuva with Deep Scan activated and it didn't work, giving me the message "Failed to scan the following drives: D:: Unable to determine file system type". So what do I do now? To setup a file system for the drive I need to format it, making it lose all my data. Heeeelp

 

[ebysamz]

4 hours ago, OvrilPT said:

So the scan finished but it only recognized the RAW partition, not the unallocated ones, which also had files, then I ran Recuva with Deep Scan activated and it didn't work, giving me the message "Failed to scan the following drives: D:: Unable to determine file system type". So what do I do now? To setup a file system for the drive I need to format it, making it lose all my data. Heeeelp

 

I have never seen this before but I found some thing to try out:

http://html5.litten.com/how-to-fix-external-disk-drive-suddenly-became-raw/

If this doesn't work, you have to find a professional.

Good luck

 

[samiscool51]

if you can copy the data on the drive, then copy it to an external drive and wipe the drive this can fix broken partitions

[Shingouki]

There are tons of programs that can scan the unallocated space. Find one that suits your needs and go for it. I use photorec.
DON'T WRITE ANYTHING ON IT, Don't format, don't wipe, don't do anything, unless you are sure you tried everything.
You can also try to recover the partition table, and mount that without writing to the disk. An useful tool is a cd or a pen with UBCD on it.

[DingdongTP]

9 hours ago, Shingouki said:

There are tons of programs that can scan the unallocated space. Find one that suits your needs and go for it. I use photorec.
DON'T WRITE ANYTHING ON IT, Don't format, don't wipe, don't do anything, unless you are sure you tried everything.
You can also try to recover the partition table, and mount that without writing to the disk. An useful tool is a cd or a pen with UBCD on it.

I'm using right now EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard and after a 7 hour scan it managed to find all my data (I hope, I haven't copied everything yet) but the filenames and directories are busted, and since I had about 1.7TB worth of data there, it will take me a VERY LONG time to sort everything out and arrange it in folders (if I can even do that), but it's better than ending up with all my data lost I guess..

[Shingouki]

1 hour ago, OvrilPT said:

I'm using right now EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard and after a 7 hour scan it managed to find all my data (I hope, I haven't copied everything yet) but the filenames and directories are busted, and since I had about 1.7TB worth of data there, it will take me a VERY LONG time to sort everything out and arrange it in folders (if I can even do that), but it's better than ending up with all my data lost I guess..

Surely

I'd suggest you, since you recovered the files, to try to recover the partition table and the MBR, if you can recover it, you'll have everything back.

[DingdongTP]

Just now, Shingouki said:

Surely

I'd suggest you, since you recovered the files, to try to recover the partition table and the MBR, if you can recover it, you'll have everything back.

I'm not familiar with that software, can you please tell me how it works and how do I use it?

[Shingouki]

There are several programs that can try to recover the partition table and the MBR.
If you download UBCD, you'll find Gparted inside (not only that, but that's the easiest one to use) and testdisk. They are the easiest to use, IMHO.

 

In case of Gparted, you'll have a linux distro, it will mount the disks if possible, or and you can try to recover the old partition table.

[DingdongTP]

19 minutes ago, Shingouki said:

There are several programs that can try to recover the partition table and the MBR.
If you download UBCD, you'll find Gparted inside (not only that, but that's the easiest one to use) and testdisk. They are the easiest to use, IMHO.

 

In case of Gparted, you'll have a linux distro, it will mount the disks if possible, or and you can try to recover the old partition table.

I'm not an "advanced" user when it comes to this kind of problem, can you provide a web guide of something like that that I can follow so I know I'm not screwing up? Also if the partition table gets recovered it means that my files are all going to be where they where before, with the directories sorted? I don't know what is the meaning of MBR or partition tables, I haven't even heard of that before this problem came up . Sorry for my dumbness

[Shingouki]

Listen, i'll be clear with you: i'm the last man on earth that can explain how to use these program to anyone. I'm really bad at this. You can find every information here http://gparted.org/display-doc.php%3Fname%3Dhelp-manual

If you didn't write on your disk, and you manage to recover all the partition table, you'll find the hard disk AS it was before the errors. So yes, you'll find every directory and every file where they were before.

[DingdongTP]

1 minute ago, Shingouki said:

Listen, i'll be clear with you: i'm the last man on earth that can explain how to use these program to anyone. I'm really bad at this. You can find every information here http://gparted.org/display-doc.php%3Fname%3Dhelp-manual

If you didn't write on your disk, and you manage to recover all the partition table, you'll find the hard disk AS it was before the errors. So yes, you'll find every directory and every file where they were before.

Okay so a follow up, EaseUS found after the scan 3 "directories" inside "Lost Partition".

One of them is called "Lost Partition1(NTFS)", which kept some of the folders untouched and the original names of the files;

Another one "Special Lost Files (Label)" which divided the files by a part of the metadata which could be recovered (example: Artists Folder - A folder created by the software that contained music sorted by artist names; Camera Folder - A folder created by the software that contained pictures sorted by the camera from which they were taken);

And a third directory "More Lost Files (RAW)" which contained the majority of the lost files, sorted by their file extension, without keeping names of folder structures.

I proceeded to save important files from each of the directories into another HDD I had, and I found out that even though the "Lost Partition1(NTFS)" was the one who kept most of the files similar to the originals, when I tried to open the files, none of them opened, regardless of the file type, always claiming the files were corrupted or had another problem that didn't let them be opened. Besides that, the other directories, even though their file names and sorting are all messed up, worked fine and the files open normally without a problem until this moment. Do you know any solution? Should I give up this software and try out your solution? I haven't written anything on the drive since I've moved it to inside the PC, I only scanned for the lost files.

[Shingouki]

I've never used EaseUS, i recovered the files everytime using photorec (that does not recover the directories, since it does a low level scan to recover the files) and some partition managers to recover partitions.

When you scan on low level, the program scans the clusters in your hard disk and reads everything. After that, it identifies the files by reading them (not the extension, the file) and saves them as the corresponding type identified.

When you recover the partition, instead, recover the "index", the part of the hard disk that tells where that file starts and where it ends, and how directories are organized on your hard disk. That's why when you recover a partition you get everything back.

 

I'd say, once you recovered the file, give it a shot. The worst thing you can do is format the disk, and it's something you will do anyway, likely.

[DingdongTP]

On 24/08/2016 at 3:28 PM, Shingouki said:

I've never used EaseUS, i recovered the files everytime using photorec (that does not recover the directories, since it does a low level scan to recover the files) and some partition managers to recover partitions.

When you scan on low level, the program scans the clusters in your hard disk and reads everything. After that, it identifies the files by reading them (not the extension, the file) and saves them as the corresponding type identified.

When you recover the partition, instead, recover the "index", the part of the hard disk that tells where that file starts and where it ends, and how directories are organized on your hard disk. That's why when you recover a partition you get everything back.

 

I'd say, once you recovered the file, give it a shot. The worst thing you can do is format the disk, and it's something you will do anyway, likely.

Okay, sorry for the late response, here are my results:

I successfully copied every file to another drive using EaseUS, then I thought to myself "well, if this is all backed up, let's follow the advice of that guy in the forum and use UBCD", right after that a thought came to my mind, and before I tried the program, I decided to switch the HDD back to the original enclosure and see what happened. Surprise surprise, the files were all there and the folder structure was intact .

Then I proceeded to delete everything I had backed up with EaseUS, and then copy everything again with the names an the folder structures. The whole process took me about 24h of copying, considering that it was 1.5TB and the USB controller problem was still there, forcing me to disconnect and reconnect the drive every ~5 minutes.

 

In the meantime, I did a little of research, and I've discovered the main reason the drive got split into 3 partitions was due to the MBR system, which apparently has no problem working through USB, but while the HDD was inside the computer, the MBR system could only support HDDs up to 2TB, due to being an old standard.

Then, after everything copied to my other drive, I put the HDD back into the PC, switched it to a GPT drive using MiniTool Partition Wizard Free, and then I could format the drive with only one partition of 3TB. After doing that, I ran CrystalDiskInfo to check on the S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive after all the changes, but I had no luck. Besides the USB controller on the external enclosure, S.M.A.R.T. reported reallocated sectors already passing the threshold.

 

So to conclude, I have managed to save all my files without any corruption to them, but the drive probably already had problems before the USB controller stopped working normally (probably due to high heat levels,), so I'll be getting another drive soon (an internal one this time) to replace this one. Thanks for all the help and sorry for the long post, I hope I can help someone in the future that has a similar problem to mine.

[Shingouki]

Happy that you recovered everything

 

Future reminder: don't trust those external enclosures. The 2.5" are good, since all the current is from USB, and it's stable (well, unless your pc is broken, or you're using a powered USB HUB); but I've had tons of issues with 3.5" ones especially power related. The current of your house is not 100% stable, and the power brick that comes with those external enclosures is neither reliable.

 

The only HDD hub i have to use is behind an APC UPS, and almost every time i use it i check the power brick before using it.