Basic to dynamic disk hard drive recover partitions

[giibbo]

Hi guys can you help me with my problem.
I have a 1tb drive that came from a Netgear Readynas box. (Not a raid setup - very basic disk setup)
I put it in my pc to read some data off it and saw that it was a basic disk, however I could not read the data from it. I saw that you could convert it to a dynamic disk in windows disk managment.
So I converted it believing what I read off the internet that the data would still be there. The 4 partitions remained the same, and windows would show the drives but it was asking me to format them before use. I didnt want to do that and loose all my data. So I decided it was better to convert it back to a basic disk using your partition ultility as so not to loose anything. When I did that using your utility the drive showed up as one big partition. I would like some help to figure out what I can do to restore the hard drive back to its original state.

 

[sturm]

Your best bet is to get a drive recovery program. There is a free one that I used but can't remember what it was....not at home at this time.
Use it to recover your files, if you can. Then reformat the drive to your liking.

 

[giibbo]

Hi giibbo,

Can you tell us more information for the problem? For example, what's your operating system? what the disk partition style (MBR or GPT)?

Okay the disk ran on ReadyNAS Box that runs Linux as far as I can tell because when I ran file recovery tools it came up as a basic disc with 4 EXT3 partitions.

I dont know if its Master Boot Record or GPT but im guessing its MBR because the first 2gb partition has linux boot folders on it.
(Correct me if im wrong there)

There were 3 other partitions. One I reckonized being my data cause it was huge 930gb or so.

The other two I have nu idea about.

So before I found out that it was a linux system. I had already plugged one of the two terabye hard drives into my pc and everything was cool. I could read the data off it. Used it for more space, bla bla bla

Then I plugged the first hard drive that the ReadyNAS box uses into my pc and it couldn't read it. Being a basic disk and EXT3 file system, know I know why.

Did some quick reasearch on the net to find out it converting it from basic to dynamic would be find without loosing the data. Someone said it would be ok. Shouldn't of trusted that scource cause after that it was all down hill from there.

Anywayz i ran EASEus partition master on it and converted it succesfully back to a basic disk. But instead of 4 partitions it now had 1 big basic disk.

Then I ran EASEus partition recovery on it and found the missing partitions the boot one and the main data one with all the correct folders. So im gathering the data is still there.

Ran EASEus file recovery and it picked up files but did not pick up the directories correctly or the file names properly. Man I was pissed. I ran it for 4 hours searching.

Now im a bit lost what to do.

Please save me supergeek

 

[giibbo]

Latest update:

Photorec.exe apart of testdisk.exe recovery utility is recovering some things, but its going to take a while to tell and they are not being recovered in any sort of directory order or file names properly.

I plugged the hard drive back into the NAS box and instead of ReadyNAS raidar saying that the whole drive is corrupt, not its just saying the root files are corrupt.

So I think i might be making some progress

Would like to know if there is any basic disk, linux recovery tools out there been looking and trying a few but dont know what may fix my prob

 

[giibbo]

PARTITION INFO

Using ZAR partition recovery..

 

[giibbo]

for all those wanting to know which file recovery app is king its

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/

did excatly what i wanted recovered the tree

 

[giibbo]

update....

zar recovery only worked on the boot partition and not on the linux extended c partition

Use DiskGenuis.exe from heirns boot cd and it will do the job

So extra happy today....after a few days of searching through dozens of applications this one finally does it the best for linux 8e partition types

some screen shots below