At our SOHO we have several 3TB NTFS GUID partitioned hard disks. One of them became unusable. windows did not even recognized it.
Using a hard disk edit utility we found the partition table was completely ruined. In order to recover the data (it was almost full)
I switched to a Linux machine in order to rebuild the partition table (strange we trust more Linux than than the native OS to do such a delicate task) and
made the following:
a) saved the partition table of other disk (they are all the from same manufacturer and geometry)
b) restored such partition to the damaged disk
c) randomized the GUID table in order to avoid conflict
After performing step c) Linux inmediatly recognized it (initially it didn't) and the disk could be mounted
and the data could be read. Voila! but...as we use to say in mexico, we sang victory too soon. windows still doesn't recognize it.
Using the same disk utility, we checked that the new ("restored") GUID table is fine and all entries are correct.
I don´t know if for GUID partition tables, a copy of the first table is kept somewhere in the disk. If this is the case, maybe
step a) only saved the first table, and steps b) and c) restored it leaving the tables unsynchronized since the GUIDs in the copy
won't match the ones from the restored table and windows therefore doesn't see the disk as valid. Although the disk appears (a letter is assigned to it),
it doesn't show a valid partition table, claiming the disk is "raw" and needs to be formatted (it also complains it contains and unknown file system).
On the other hand, both a hard disk editor and a partition recovery table utility show a valid and correct GUID partition table.
Linux can mount and read data from the disk.
¿How can we make this disk usable again under windows? ¿does a second copy exists that must be synchronized with the first one?
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1 Answer
You could always move the data to another drive and then wipe the problem drive and then reformat it. You could use Linux utilities for all of this.
