Recovering an accidentally initialized SSHD?

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Crlaozwyn

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Dec 13, 2007
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My wife's laptop was incredibly sluggish and the HDD was nearly full. I figured I'd be play the hero and give her an upgrade... Queue the horror music, because things didn't go as planned.

I planned to use Acronis to create a disk image and then restore from there. I removed the drive from her computer (in hindsight, why didn't I just back it up from her system? /facepalm), fired up Acronis (in W7), and immediately ran into a problem: Acronis didn't see the disk. Here's where I really screwed up - I saw it in Disk Manager, listed as uninitialized. I figured, "Oh sweet, I wonder why it wasn't recognized?" and initialized the disk. In research I've done since then, I'm pretty sure her drive was GPT and I nuked it with an MBR. I haven't made other changes to the drive. I was able to clone the now inaccessible drive and am mostly working with the backup to try to prevent any further damage.

I've poked around a bit in GDisk and TestDisk. It does see the various partitions; the largest is listed as HPFS - NTFS and is labelled Windows. I haven't had any luck restoring the GPT from backup and get a CRC check failed error. I tried to follow the info here but it's more general info. I can't find a good tutorial to follow. I'm currently running Disk Drill on the backup and it seems that could get most of the raw data (pictures, movies, documents) back but it loses filenames and metadata. With 5+ years of family photos, I don't know if we'd ever be able to get it all organized again!

It's a Lenovo Flex 2, running Windows 10. The drive is a Seagate ST500LM000.

My ideal state would be having someone help me rebuild the GPT, which I hope/believe/pray/beg will restore the drive to its original condition.

If anyone is able to help, I'd REALLY appreciate it! Thank you in advance!
 
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Crlaozwyn

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Thanks for the reply. My goal is to keep the data intact, IE: rebuilding the existing GPT instead of creating a new one and wiping the data. I did try using W10's startup recovery - it did nothing. Using DiskPart from the command prompt, it showed there were no volumes or partitions related to the disk, which would be the case when the partition tables have been damaged.

If I understand correctly, I've basically killed the drive's table of contents, but the data itself should still be intact.
 
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13thmonkey

13thmonkey

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In that case you a looking for recovery software.

But expecting the recovery of a whole working OS is optimistic to say the least, file recovery should be where you set your expectations.
 
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Crlaozwyn

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Is it unrealistic? the drive was initialized and nothing has been done to it since. No data should have overwritten either the OS or other data, unless the MBR that overwrote the GPT was larger, which I don't believe is the case.
 
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13thmonkey

13thmonkey

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Crlaozwyn

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It does help, yes. I've run across those articles but will dive deeper into them. So far, I'd say I've spent about 15 hours online researching various tools and options, not including time spent considering and discussing. I have a technical background, but there's an emotional component here that's stopping me from thinking logically.

I'll keep plugging away. If someone does come across a simple solution, please let me know. I'll post my resolution here for others to find.
 
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RolandJS

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There might be an answer using MiniTool Partition Magic version 9.1 -- I used it to bring back a ghosted partition; however, I do not know how to use English well enough to walk you through the complicated [to me!] process; you might have to find and use a local computer guru who will know what to do -- and you will pay that person some monies.

Addendum; the process included:
-- backed up the data partition; that was the only partition not ghosted
-- recovered the ghosted OS partition, process ghosted the data partition
-- backed up the OS partition
-- using Acronis Disk Director 12, unallocated the entire internal HD
-- using ADD12, reMade the two partitions I use for OS and Data
-- restoring from backups the OS and data partitions respectively
-- using Windows Startup Repair to finesse the Windows load & startup
 
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Crlaozwyn

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Realized that I didn't post a resolution to this issue - sorry!

I got EVERYTHING back. I found a sector level backup from around 5 years ago, restored it to an identical drive, backed the partition table to a file, then restored the partition table to the drive with the missing data. Boom. Everything is there.
 
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13thmonkey

13thmonkey

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I'm really surprised, you might find some newer files aren't there, as they weren't on the sector level backup. But well done, you can come out of the dog house now.
 
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Crlaozwyn

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The only thing I retrieved from the old backup was the GPT, which is what had been damaged by initializing the disk. The result of this was to get access to all files on the hard drive at the time the GPT was wiped out. Here are the steps in a bit more detail:

1) Buy identical ST500LM000 drive from Amazon
2) Wait impatiently
3) Restore old sector-level backup to the new drive
4) Use GDisk to back up the MBR/GPT to a file
5) Clone the original drive to the new one (in case things go sideways)
6) Use GDisk to restore the MBR/GPT from the backup created in #4
7) ????
8) Profit

 
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