External hard drive no partition tables recovery

[Guest]

Hello,

I have got an IOMEGA external drive that for no apparent reason (no physical damage)started giving the message that it needs formatting. I did not do that but I cannot think what I could so other than that. SOme computer technicians at my univesity rtied using Stellar software and did an extensive scan that took very long, but they said that they could not recover anything. I really need the documents, the are work towards my dissertation. I am currently doing a scan with Active@partition recovery, cause apparently the partition tables are gone. But were I to actually press the button, I am concerned I might do the wrong thing, and they do say in their help section that if you are to restore the partition, some writing is involved. Is this risky, and with my problem (disk reads as unformatted) should I try certain things rather than others? Advice will be much appreciated!!!

 

[blackmancer]

well, now you realise how important it is to have atleast 2 copies of your important data, you can only try. think of it as already gone and try restoring the partition and maybe you'll have a nice surprise afterwards. if someone has tried a recovery on it and failed, u can only try and see what happens.

 

[fzabkar]

Could we see the partition table and boot sector with Microsoft's Sector Inspector?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

Extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file. The procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt which you can then upload to a file sharing service so that we can examine it.