Here is the story: After running several Scandisk tests my brother’s 160GB hard drive failed to show at BIOS system report on reboot. The hard drive was NFTS formatted so I thought that the recovery process should go easy.I ran my favorite recovery software R-Studio, FileScavenger etc… but they didn’t recognize the hard drive at all. It appeared that drive’s geometry (heads,sectors,cylinders) information was also incorrect. So no matter how many file recovery applications I was running the result was the same: unrecognized file system or misplaced file information.
I looked at the hard drive’s sticker and noticed the Cylinders Heads Sectors values (information that could also be found in drive's service manual). Then loaded up the free testdisk program and carefully entered those numbers in the Geomety section. But the 160GB hard drive now appeared as 37GB… - what was happening? In order to allocate and handle bigger hard drives sizes engineers have invented: 2 types of addressing: logical and physical - physical were the ones that I found on the drive’s cover. The logical CHS values are chosen by the operating system.
Indeed testdisk needs one more value: the sector size (512, 1024, 2048 or 4092). So I just started the format dialogue in windows and noticed that the default 'sector size' value was 512. Next searched Google for my hard drive’s serial number and found the logical CHS values in postings from linux 'dmesg' command and other diagnostic tools.
I loaded testdisk’s Geometry with those new numbers, then run Analyse to rescan the hard drive for partitions and they showed up, Write followed and after the reboot the hard drive finally showed in BIOS system report. Windows also recognized the drive but the information was still inaccessible.
So I run Filescavenger and restored the information to a blank hard drive. Then reformatted the first one and moved back the recovered information.
Cheers!
by Nevyan Neykov
Cheers!
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