Hi all !!
I have a question for all of you. I have an external HDD and suddenly it became inaccesible. fdisk -l didn’t list any partition for the drive, so I suspected some sort of problem with partition table.
The drive had several partitions: one NTFS, 3 ext3 and one for swap (when booting in Linux from the drive).
I tried to use testdisk for solving the problem. But a curious thing happens: after some runs of testdisk I discovered that I cannot recover all the partitions at the same time. If I recover the NTFS, I cannot recover the ext3. And viceversa, if I recover the ext3, NTFS partition cannot be accessed.
I have some idea about which is the problem. After recovering the three ext3 partitions, testdisk detected two similar NTFS partitions: the first one start at the correct sector, so if I press “p” in testdisk I can see the files stored in the NTFS partition. However, testdisk asigns all the drive space (about 1 TB) to the NTFS partition, so I cannot recover the ext3 partitions !!. The second NTFS partition has the correct size, but it starts at the wrong point !! So if I press “p” on the second partition, I cannot see any file on it !.
In the image you can see the results of testdisk.
My first question is: how can I change the start point of my NTFS partition inside testdisk?
The right starting point for the partition is 0-1-2 (first line of the NTFS detected partitions). From here I can see the files and directories of the disk. But the size is wrong, and selecting this partition avoid using the three ext3 partitions (marked as “Linux”).
The right size is 536.876.169 sectors (second line of the NTFS detected partitions). But the starting point is wrong. If I choose this partition, I can also recover my Linux partitions. But as the starting point is wrong, I have no root directory, and I cannot access any of the files.
My second question is: is it safe if I first recover the NTFS “big” partition (the one with the files, but reserving all the space), then change its size using gparted and finally trying to recover the Linux partitions using testdisk again?
OpenMandriva Lx version: 2014.2
Desktop environment (KDE, LXQT…): KDE 4
_Relevant informations (hardware involved, software version, logs or output…):_External HDD is a Samsung Model M3, 1 TB, USB3.
Hi,
what I would do first is the saving of the image of your disk using dd or alike. If you have not enough space but enough time, you can also compress the image. Example (adapt the parameters):
– copy with compression
Now you have several possibilities:
– restore the first NTFS partition and copy the files somewhere else, then restore the image and do the same with the ext3 partitions
– copy the image on another drive and work with testdisk on it.
– if nothing works in an acceptable way, you might try to restore your documents using photorec. If the most important is restoring your documents, photorec might be the first choice as it doesn’t modify anything on the corrupted disk.
[quote=“Sirius, post:1, topic:1339”]
My second question is: is it safe if I first recover the NTFS “big” partition (the one with the files, but reserving all the space), then change its size using gparted and finally trying to recover the Linux partitions using testdisk again?
[/quote] I don’t know but it might be worth a try.
The disk is not my main disk, so my system is still working fine, and I don’t lost files up to now. Sadly, I don’t have enough space to save the image disk in another place. I need 256 GB (well, it’s the size of the partition, it was not full), and the only one place where I can save that much is in the “M3HOME” partition (see the image) on the same disk !!! As I can gain access to my ext3 partitions, I guess I don’t need to save the whole terabyte into a file.
What I’m doing for now? From inside testdisk I can save particular directories in another disk, so I’m slowing moving folders to my main disk and then saving them in DVDs. The process is very time-consuming, of course, but it’s safe.
testdisk I’m using is the last available version in 2014.2.
You may try to backup only MBR (512 bytes) then you may change the original partition table with testdisk or make a new one with testdisk. You may find some more info searching over the net (for instance here). It a bit risky if you have never tried it but could work if the disk is not physically damaged and you never mount the disk with write permissions on.
