Hello,
I'm trying to read a toshiba sata/usb external storage drive (500GB/465GiB). A friend told me he can't read it anymore and that there is some photos on it. Don't know what happened.
I'm using bios/windows 7 32bits computer and for what I can see using testdisk and photorec, disk is empty but formatted in GPT and there is a first 'microsoft reserved' partition of 16.5 MB (not 32?); indeed I can't read it but maybe there is some trouble with it since I get 'bad sector count' error message or 'can't open for reading' with gdisk and 'unallocated' in windows disk management.
Here are some tests I made so far, let me know if you need anything else:
(hd0 or /sda is my current windows, hd1 or /sdb is the problematic usb drive)
- tinyhexer log and MBR/PBR/GPT backup can be found in the attached file (link at the end of the msg)
- drive doesn't show up in windows explorer but appears in device manager and as shown in the screenshot disk management shows unalocated drive space. Didn't try 'set new volume' and assign letter to not wipe out any content but the option is not greyed out (hence, can't try chkdsk for now - but don't know if it will be of any help here, gpt drive pluged in bios/mbr system)
- testdisk finds an efi/gpt drive but with 'bad sector count' error; tried different geometry (num of sectors per head 255, 240, 16, 32, 128), no change
also tried intel/pc (mbr) or mac, same
- ran photorec all night long then easeUS data recovery wizard, didn't find anything
- used 'Toshiba Storage Diagnostic Tool_1.30.8920', it says disk passes the tests and is healthy (chs is effectively 60801 255 63 / 512)
- booted a linux system rescue iso with gparted, it finds the two partitions but can't read them, even that 'microsoft reserved partition'
- used dmde-3.6.0.770:
first message is something like 'volume is probably not fully accessible' but initial and available space mentioned are the same (976 773 168 LBA x 512 (500 GB))
didn't try 'gpt off' without your advice
ntfs and mft modes just shows 0 everywhere from lba 3 to 976 773 163 (nothing after, shouldn't it be 976 773 168?)
I put some screens of the first 3 and the last bloc, everything in between seems to be 0 everywhere, but I don't know if the drive is read correctly.
performing full scan: will end tomorrow!
What I'm wondering firstly is wether I'm supposed to be able to read a GPT drive or not (a priori win7 x86 should have driver for it) and then what can I do except clean the disk and convert to mbr? (unless it is actually empty) It seems like someone/something formatted the drive in GPT type
(unfortunately I don't have an efi/gpt computer with windows x64 to test further)
log files at mediafire: https://www.mediafir...reports.7z/file
Thank you