data recovery / hosed GPT?

[giantbucket]

so i have a problem. i had a media machine running Win7Pro, so attached i had several hard drives - movies, photos, music, etc. the OS got hosed during the uninstall of a certain AMD application, and now i'm trying to migrate the data from the drives.

so i connect using a USB-to-SATA dongle to my Win8.1 machine, and for the first drive it doesn't mount and Disk Management tells me it's a "GPU Protective Partition" or some such thing and will not let me mount it or do ANYTHING.

i'm trying out MiniTool's Partition Wizard which might help and their Power Data Recovery which i just installed but haven't run yet cuz i don't want to break stuff.

what SHOULD i be doing? no chance i want to format the drive!!! this first (of four) drives has tons of photos, music, and documents on it. and i have three more drives to check after this...

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi

Does the pc have a 64 bit windows?
(And win 7 or latter)

What size is bad hdd?
Some old usb to sata have 2 TB limit

Esata or internal sata port would be better

What size is first partition?
If less than 1 GB ignore them they may be hidden partitions part of gpt partitioning system
Provided 64 bit win 7 , 8 ot 10 and uefi bios should be able read the gpt partitioned hdd

If corrupted patitions
TestDisk from cgsecurity may be able to repair partition

Regards
Mike Barnes

 

[giantbucket]

the original system was Win7Pro64, and my "system i'm trying to check stuff on" is Win8.1-64
the drive is a WD Red, 2TB, and was originally done as GPT NTFS with a single large partition and was about half full of files

i will try internal SATA in the next few days but on another machine since i don't want to risk screwing up this Win8.1 machine (it's my office+steam computer), and i found that testdisk program so i'll try it then. i'm cobbling together a "test computer" for these types of tasks, so that even if i hose the OS there, i won't care as much


QUESTION:
if i mistakenly change from GPT to MBR, is it possible to change back to GPT? assume i don't format or otherwise use the drive

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi

I dont think you can accidentally go from gpt to mbr without destroying your data
Gpt has a number of very small partitions before and after the main partition
One after the main partition should be a backup of main gpt partition

Hopefully version 7 or 7.1 of testdisk can fix this

Is the problem on all the hdd or only one?

Regards
Mike Barnes