My year old 3TB Seagate drive stopped working. The drive had 3 ext4 1TB partitions which hold almost 2 years of accumulated data. I was using it in a ubuntu server when the mounted partitions stopped showing folders. On reboots, partitions would always mount but not show any data or show some folders with some data.
I took it out and attached it to a windows laptop via USB-to-SATA adapter. In AOEMI Partition Assistant Pro, the drive would show up but show weird partition scheme and sizes. Using the "Partition Recovery" option would also not work as it would be unable to find partitions:
I also tried using testdisk:
testdisk seems to locate 3 Linux partitions but its "Quick Analysis" feature returns the partition as FAT16 and something about "it can't be recovered because size is too small". This is my first time using these recovery tools so I have no idea what they mean. I did not do anything permanent for the fear of nuking all data. If anyone has an idea whats going on, please let me know.