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I have a seagate 3TB external hard drive with GPT. I accidentally pulled out the power cord and upon reboot was faced with a Raw Partition message in Windows Explorer re: You need to format your drive before you use it.

I didn't do that but instead opened the drive in MiniTool Partition Wizard 7. The following was displayed:

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So great news my partition still seems to be there. Not 1337-R-BAK but the other unallocated space. This is the correct size and I can access data on 1337-R-BAK as well.

So I use the partition recovery feature of this application it finds my partition as below.

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So great i follow through the wizard and within Partition Magic I get this:

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I can use partition explorer within Partition Magic and can see all my files. Whew! But there is no option to open them using this tool. Im pretty sure it's just reading the NTFS file table which hopefully means that the NTFS file table is in tact and my files are not corrupted.

Note tho that these Disk 2 partitions were originally GPT partitions as per Disk 3, but now they are Logical Primary.

Now if I go to Computer Manager the larger than 2GB partition, 1337-F-BAK, is not recognised as a whole partition and instead Windows splits it into a couple of partitions.

enter image description here

So I've got a bit of a chicken and egg problem. I need the disk initialised to GPT before I recover the partition but if I do that I'm pretty sure it will wipe the partition table and then I wont be able to recover the files on the partition. However by not initializing first I can't access the data in windows although at least I can take comfort that my data is still "there".

What is the process I should follow to dig myself out of this one?

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  • I do not have an answer, but if you can Read_Only recover at any stage, why not? then GPT it and read-only recover again, then fix.
    – Psycogeek
    Commented Apr 7, 2013 at 7:28
  • Try installing my [GPT fdisk (gdisk) software.][1] This is a command-line partitioning tool that examines and manipulates the partition table only (that is, it ignores the underlying filesystems). It's got a verification feature (v) that reports disk problems. Post the results of using that feature, as well as of viewing the partition table (p). [1]: rodsbooks.com/gdisk
    – Rod Smith
    Commented Apr 7, 2013 at 18:04

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Ok so in the end I installed WinHex 17.0. This allowed me to go beneath the file system and partition tables to the raw disk and pull file according to file header signatures.

Since this was a newish disk that hadn't been filled this worked really well as the disk had never reached capacity and had never been defragmented therefore the clusters were all nicely sequential.

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