3TB, GPT and Data recovery help please!!!

Defiant306 · 1 Nov 2012 at 08:44

Hi

I'm looking for some advice and help with this following issue.

I installed a 3TB drive into my PC system for data retension and it has a non UEFI bios, I formatted the drive with GPT layout to then have the drive corrupt one night after getting 2TB+ of data onto the drive.

I did a bit digging to find that there seems to be an issue with Intel matrix storage drivers/software as +2TB drive aren't properly supported with any version less than 10. Which has also changed name to Intel Rapid Storage Technology, which is currently on v11.

To add to the issues when I uninstall the old driver and rebooted, windows them deleted a mass of orphan files from the drive then the entries for the files from the boot record for the partition!!!

So currently now the drive has about 100Gb of generic recovered data which makes no sense and the system now sees a 2.7TB partition again (Previously showed as raw unformatted)

What I really need help with is recovery of the data from the drive I'm having a massive issue trying find something that can deal with this since its GPT. Does anyone some advice or can recommend a recovery program that can find the data?

Currently I have ordered another 3TB drive to recover the data too.

So please please can you help!

Mr Blonde · 1 Nov 2012 at 13:23

You might struggle without a UEFI bios and as you say, the usual Recuva and Getdataback type of app may not work at all due to GPT.

GPT fdisk, Fixparts and/or Parted Magic however might be able to shimmy things enough for either of them to at least see your data, which is likely the best you can hope for, going on my limited reading about this.

Maybe have a read about GPT Fdisk first and see if you feel it would help : http://rodsbooks.com/gdisk/index.html

Defiant306 · 1 Nov 2012 at 13:30

From what I have read, updating the Intel drivers Rapid Storage seems to sort support of +2TB drives.

I had a quick look at Gdisk and I wasn't really looking forward to using it.

Mr Blonde · 1 Nov 2012 at 13:40

Yes, it didn't look too inviting.

I've just seen Sleuthkit which also supports GPT : http://www.sleuthkit.org/autopsy/download.php

Install this and then Autopsy for a GUI interface if needed :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/autopsy/files/autopsy/3.0.0/

Again, if it sees the partition then this might be worth trying...
apparently you can use the 'mmls' option to extract partitions and then use normal data recovery software to examine them.