[terry1966]

ok for now i'd leave testdisk alone.

 

i'd use photorec :- http://www.cgsecurit...g/wiki/PhotoRec or recuva :- https://www.piriform.com/recuva to search the drive for lost files and save them to your other drive, if neither can find any files then that will confirm my pessimism and the drive is wiped and empty with nothing you can do to save the data that was on it..

 

with luck though they willl find everything on the drive and copy the files to your other drive. once that is done it's then up to you if you want to continue trying to fix things with test disk, or simply just format the drive again and run some tests on it to see if it's failing and not worth risking your data on it again, or if it passes as ok then copy the files back to it.

 

Edited by terry1966, 25 August 2017 - 05:14 PM.

[Advertisements]

Eventually said, "no partition found or selected for recovery".  Quit is my only option.

[rkhames]

Eventually said, "no partition found or selected for recovery".  Quit is my only option.

[rkhames]

Eventually said, "no partition found or selected for recovery".  Quit is my only option.

[rkhames]

Eventually said, "no partition found or selected for recovery".  Quit is my only option.  It says Partition: read error

[rkhames]

Eventually said, "no partition found or selected for recovery".  Quit is my only option.  It says Partition: read error

[rkhames]

Eventually said, "no partition found or selected for recovery".  Quit is my only option.  It says Partition: read error

[rkhames]

Eventually said, "no partition found or selected for recovery".  Quit is my only option.  It says Partition: read error

[rkhames]

The next thing that happened is that it came back with Partition: Read error.  Not sure what to make of this.

[terry1966]

 

ok for now i'd leave testdisk alone.

 

i'd use photorec :- http://www.cgsecurit...g/wiki/PhotoRec or recuva :- https://www.piriform.com/recuva to search the drive for lost files and save them to your other drive, if neither can find any files then that will confirm my pessimism and the drive is wiped and empty with nothing you can do to save the data that was on it..

 

with luck though they willl find everything on the drive and copy the files to your other drive. once that is done it's then up to you if you want to continue trying to fix things with test disk, or simply just format the drive again and run some tests on it to see if it's failing and not worth risking your data on it again, or if it passes as ok then copy the files back to it.

 

[rkhames]

Best Answer

Sooooo..... I finally got an external usb sata connector and yanked the drive from the computer case.  Upon removing the drive, the computer returned to normal function (minus the missing data drive for picture and music).  Everything seems fine.  I plugged the now-removed drive into the external cable and, viola!, the drive showed up in windows explorer and everything was accessible.

 

I don't know why accessing the drive in this manner is different from when it was plugged into the motherboard but, I also don't really care.  The drive is a 7 year old 1TB WD so, I'm copying the contents to a newer drive and just keeping the removed one in a drawer somewhere as a backup.  I still have plenty of storage and can move on from this.

 

Sorry I didn't get to try out any of the cool tools for recovery but, I don't think it's worth screwing with.  Thanks to everyone for their input.