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I am trying to recover data of of a failed archive drive for a friend. The drive resided in a NAS case to save important business info. The drive contains the only copy of the data. The case power supply failed rendering the case useless. The drive file table has been rendered corrupted in the process. Installing the drive in a new case and booting Windows displays the drive - but Windows Explorer asks you to insert a disk when it is clicked.

Switching to Ubuntu - drive does not mount properly (shows errors - unable to mount) Gparted shows the drive with an exclamation (partition error). Ran Testdisk and selected to Write partition table with no change. Ran Photorec which recovered a series of inch x inch image files of page size files (eg. cut an A4 page into inch x inch squares - get the point?).

I have an image of Gparted's error but not able to post due to my current forum rep level.

Switch back to Windows to try chkdsk /f, which gave an error drive not available.

Are there any other ways to recover or rebuils the partition table so I can successfully mount and recover the drive?

For interest sake, sudo fdisk -l displays:

Disk /dev/sdd: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488397168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x862715b5

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdd1   *          63   488375999   244187968+   7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

Also tried sudo ntfs-3g -o force,rw /dev/sdd1 /home/andrew/recovery and it says invalid parition, unable to mount.

Andrew Heath
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3 Answers3

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Found MiniTool Partition Wizard for Windows. It's a free program and it finally did the job. It could 'see' the drive I'm trying to recover and has a 'Check File System' button. It found 3 errors in the file system bitmap - which it fixed. File table repaired, File Explorer shows files, all good!

Renju Chandran chingath
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Andrew Heath
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If I was you, I would take a look at R-Studio which is my favourite recovery tool.

Just plug the drive in, select the disk (rather than partition), and it should be able to recover if it is possible.

There are other tools, and this one isn't free, but, it is by far my favourite.

William Hilsum
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try test disk

this article shows you how to use it

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

Kalpesh Soni
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