External HDD Recovery Effort - Need Help Understanding TestDisk Results...

trent_brown97

Honorable
Sep 12, 2013
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10,510
Hello all,
I am trying to recover my LaCie External 500GB HDD which seems to be corrupted after a misfortunate event. I was copying a large file to it and the computer crashed and I was forced to manually restart the computer. Now on plugging the drive in to my Windows PC I get the error "Windows needs to format drive K: before you can use it" or something like that, and when I plug it into my MacBook I get the error message "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer". I have been running test disk to attempt to recover the drive and the data on it, and I need help understanding what all the results I've come up with mean, and if it's actually possible to fix it? I have tried various different routes and have taken screenshots of everything, which I will post.
Any help would be massively appreciated.
Trent.

(This drive was not backed up because it was the biggest drive I owned)

Following are the steps I took on TestDisk and what it showed...
Obviously I selected my Hard Drive and pressed Enter, then I selected Intel/PC because thats what it said the partition type was.
Then I get to the first window:

Menu.tiff


So I pressed "Advanced" and got this next window:

Advanced.tiff


I When I pressed "List" all I got was a screen that says this: "Can't open filesystem. Filesystem seems damaged."

Not very good... So I pressed "Quit" and returned to the previous menu where instead I pressed "Boot".
This is what I got:

Boot.tiff


This is where I got confused. I really have no idea what all those "warnings" mean. However as my next move I pressed "Dump" because I knew what that meant. When I pressed that I got something a little interesting...
It showed me my boot sector and backup boot sector dump, but as I scrolled to the bottom I noticed something strange.
It looked like this:

Boot%20Sector%20Dump.tiff


Now you'll notice if you string all that together it says this: "A disk read error occurred... NTLDR is compressed... Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart..." Now I thought that was quite strange. I looked up what the "NTLDR" was and apparently it's a problem to do with an operating system, correct? There is no operating system on my external hard drive is there? Or is that the problem?

I really need help to understand this all, and whether its possible to fix my poor LaCie hard drive. Sorry If I sound like I'm waffling on a bit...
Thanks, Trent.
 
did you try to clean up your HDD? (clean up system files) (more options) then clean up system restore and shadow copies. try it
OR try to copy again your large file to complete copying. incomplete copy may result to be corrupted.