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Short story: My new drive ended up having RAW partition instead of NTFS after running repair-bde command. Can't access any of files.

Long story: Had a 2TB laptop HDD as my second drive for data storage, which was encrypted with Bitlocker. Noticed some weird behavior and ran chkdsk, and sure enough, it reported problems beyond recovery. SMART shows 100+ sectors that are pending remap, and manufacturer's tool says the drive is out of spare space.

Since I did not have a spare drive to backup everything, I decided to decrypt it. Unfortunately, the process stopped at 82% and I had to pause it. Googled around and found a Victoria tool. The tool offered to delete MBR record to attempt low-level remap. I figured I can restore this later. The process ran fine, many sectors were remapped, however I ended up without any partitions on the drive. Did more googling and found this: Overwrote Bitlocker MBR

Attempted to restore MBR and did a quick format on the drive. Then ran the repair-bde command to recover to another drive of the same size, which I just got. There were some bad sector warnings, but process completed with success. The new drive, however, ended up having one RAW partition instead of original NTFS. And I can't access any files. I have tried several partition tools to scan for lost partitions, but none found anything else, only the existing raw one.

Now I am running a data recovery on the new drive and this does give results, however file structure is a mess and it seems like I will need a one more drive to restore these to. What are my next steps? Wasted too much time already...

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    Let this be a lesson: anything that you don't have in 3 copies, each on a separate device, should be considered volatile.
    – gronostaj
    Commented Feb 19, 2020 at 12:07
  • Your next step is to cry and start over. Seriously, its going to be really hard if impossible to restore from this situation. See if you have backups like files send out by email or shared otherwise, and buy a backup harddisk so this does not happen again.
    – LPChip
    Commented Feb 19, 2020 at 12:09

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Answering my own question, as I managed to get all my data back. Even when hard disk had deep scratches, partial bitlocker encryption, deleted and overwritten MBR, quick-formatted. First I have obtained a second drive and did a repair-bde to it. The new drive ended up having single RAW partition... Then I tried various data recovery tools on it and none worked, but finally I found R-Studio: https://www.r-studio.com/

Yes, it's not free (if you don't know where to look). However everything worked beautifully and I have recovered nearly all files (did not notice anything missing so far). I have looked around and apparently this is what data recovery shops use.

This just shows how useless these forums are. By forums I mean some people.

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You had a failing harddisk that you started to tamper with. When a harddisk goes bad, the more read/write actions you perform to it, the worse the situation gets. And you did lots of things to it.

Because of this, it is safe to say that the drive and whatever was on it, is gone for good. You need to replace the drive and start over. Now is a good time to rethink your backup strategy and get backup drives.

If this happens next time, the first thing before doing anything else, is backup the drive in the fastest and safest way to get all data off of it. You can then tamper with the drive in any way possible without risking losing any data.

At work, we use Acronis (paid software) to create an image, skip all file errors and write that to a network area storage (NAS) location. We then verify that the backup was successfully by attempting to open a file extracted from the image, and only then we decide what to do next. We usually just replace the drive and reinstall windows, then copy back the files from the image. This is usually successful. Do note, we usually deal with a 1 HDD/SSD in a computer, so there is just one partition. If the partition windows is installed is unaffected, then we would just swap the defective disk and restore the backup to it.

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