Strange case of a known working external hard disk not being accessible anymore. Upon connection to a PC, Windows reports that "You need to format the disk in drive F: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?" chkdsk /f looks promising as it seems to be able to "see" the files, but didn't restore the lost partitions even after a full day and night of fixing errors. Windows 7 Disk Management is reporting the HDD as RAW, healthy. No valid partitions anywhere.
Looks like the partition got corrupted. Thought of booting a Linux live CD and using some parition manager like Parted Magic, but too time-consuming. Apparently, a lot of people have been experiencing this problem.
First software I tried is
EaseUS' Partition Recovery. The
software didn't work for me. Seems to require a similar-sized "free" partition as the missing partition to work, though it doesn't say so in the
instructions. Next one I tried is
Partition Find and Mount. It didn't find any deleted or missing partitions after the Smart Scan. Tried the Normal and Thorough Scan, but didn't do anything.
The one which finally did the trick is
GetDataBack for NTFS. According to the blurb, "GetDataBack will recover your data if the hard drive's partition table, boot record, FAT/MFT or root directory
are lost or damaged, data was lost due to a virus attack, the drive was formatted, fdisk has been run, a power failure has caused a system crash, files were lost due to a software failure, files were accidentally deleted. GetDataBack can even recover your data when the drive is no longer recognized by Windows. It can likewise be used even if all directory information - not just the root directory- is missing." You tell GetDataBack which drive and partition to work on, and it does the rest. Found all the missing directories and files. It's just a matter of copying them over to another hard disk. Software costs US$79.
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