Recreating a lost Partition Table

[Kristof]

Hi All,

 

I had an external hard drive that held all my data on it. Being the idiot I am, I never thought to back it up; big mistake. Anyhow, the hard drive broke and I was worried I lost all my data. However I opened up the case and saw that it wasn't the drive itself that had broken, but a part on the circuit board that it was attached to. I was overjoyed, and popped the drive into my pc, expecting that I had just got myself a new 1.5tb internal hard drive... However when I turned the computer on, Windows didn't register the drive. I looked in Computer Management >> Disc Management and saw the drive was shown as Not Initialized and Unallocated space.

 

I then realized that the drive stored its Partition Table on the circuit board it was attached to as an external hard drive, and so removing it from the circuit board made windows think it was a completely new unformatted drive. So my question is this: As the circuit board is still broken, is there a way to recreate the Partition Table so I can use the drive again without reformatting? I've tried 6 file recovery programs so far, and though each took roughly 12 hours to run, not a one of them found anything of note. Also I had 3 partitions on the physical drive, 2 of them NTFS, and one of them a format unreadable by Windows (luckily I had the data on that last one stored elsewhere too, so I don't need it recovered) if that changes anything.

 

Thanks for your help,

Kristof

[KenB]

Hi Kristof and welcome to ExTS

 

Have you tried booting off a Ubuntu ( Linux ) disk to see if you can access your data?

 

click here

 

Burn it to a CD

Make sure that the CDROM is first boot device in the BIOS

DO NOT install it. You want to run the oS from the CD.

 

If you boot up with the problem drive connected you may be able to access it and retrieve your data using this method.

[Kristof]

Hi Ken,

 

Thanks for your suggestion, and sorry for not posting my results earlier - I surprisingly didn't have any CD's or Flash Drives around, so I had to find some time to go out and buy one, which I couldn't do before today.

 

Anyway, I loaded up Ubuntu and sadly it didn't find my lost hard drive. It did, however, look really cool, so I'm definitely going to look into the OS a bit more :D

Still looking for a solution though.

[KenB]

The external drive - is this an IDE or SATA drive ?

 

If it is IDE have you got the jumper setting correct at the back of the drive ?

[Kristof]

It's an SATA Drive; Western Digital - WD15EADS - 1.5TB Caviar Green to be specific