Seagate GoFlex Desk - Automatically unallocated and partitioned

In 90% of external hard drives it's the SATA-USB bridge (a small PCB) inside the enclosure which fails first, whilst the drive itself is fine.

Removing the drive and putting it into a third-party enclosure usually fixes that problem, though it's sometimes not possible because some of these drives have a proprietary interface which is nether SATA nor IDE as we know it.

Oh, alright, thank you. How come the failure in that bridge cause unallocation of space?

IMHO it sounds like a logical fault rather than a hardware fault.

Since the partition information begins at sector 0, I would start by examining this sector with a disc editor in readonly mode. If you could upload its contents (in hexadecimal mode), then this will help us to narrow down the problem.

Roadkil's Sector Editor:
http://www.roadkil.net/program.php/P24/Sector%20Editor

HxD - Freeware Hex Editor and Disk Editor:
http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd

DMDE (DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery):
http://softdm.com/download.html

Is this what you said you wanted?

You need to understand the difference between logical and physical sectors. You have shown us logical sector 0 of the first logical volume. It appears to correspond to physical sector 2048 of the physical drive.

Logical sector 0 is an NTFS boot sector.

Physical sector 0 should contain a partition table.

That said, the information in your boot sector is telling us that the sector size is 512 bytes (= 0x200), the starting sector of the NTFS volume is 2048 (= 0x800), and the size of the volume is 1,953,517,560 sectors (= 0x74704FF8). However Roadkil is indicating a sector range from 0 to 1,953,517,566, so there is a slight mismatch. Roadkil's information must be coming from the partition table, so that would be the next sector to examine.

At the moment it is looking like only physical sector 0 may be corrupt, in which case the fix will be easy.

Thank you. I always love the technical information. If it will be easy, how can I fix it?

If you can't access physical sector 0, then try DMDE instead (select Mode -> Hexadecimal).

After you upload the contents of this sector, then we will be able to compare it against your NTFS boot sector. The partition table will identify all the partitions and tell us their starting sectors and partition sizes. If necessary, we can then examine each boot sector for consistency, and make any changes to sector 0.

Your NTFS boot sector looks like this one (Windows XP):
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/NTFSbrHexEd.ht...

Therefore sector 0 may look like this:
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/Win2kmbr.htm#C...

Alternatively, the boot code may be blank, in which case you will only see data in the bottom 5 lines.