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 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 noted 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 in this case testdisk was looking for a one more value: the sector size (512, 1024, 2048 or 4092). And since the drive was used on windows I just started the format command dialogue in windows and noticed that the default 'sector size' value is 512. Next searched in Google for my hard drive’s serial number and found the drive's logical CHS values in forum postings from linux 'dmesg' command output as well as other diagnostic tools.
I loaded testdisk’s Geometry with these new numbers, and ran Analyse to rescan the hard drive for partitions and they showed up!
Write followed and after the reboot the hard drive finally showed in the BIOS system report. Windows also recognized the drive but the stored information was still inaccessible.
So I run Filescavenger and restored the information to a blank hard drive. At this point you can also use testdisk. Then reformatted the first drive and moved back the recovered information.
It was a back and forth game but in the end proved worthy!
It was a back and forth game but in the end proved worthy!
