Hello all,
I have a 400 GB Freecom external hard drive that had three partitions (one NTFS, two FAT) which I use on my laptop (Macintosh, dual-boots Windows 7). Recently, one of the FAT partitions started having issues where it would not mount or be visible when connected to the laptop when booted under OS X, whereas it worked fine under Windows. After I did some partition resizing, suddenly the drive disconnected and all partitions became unreadable on both operating systems.
Using various disk managers, all of them said that the drive did not have any partitions, and that all space was "unallocated". None of the tools (EaseUS, Minitool) would detect any of my data on the drive and as far as they are concerned, the drive was empty. I have followed a few tutorials through Googling (including a number of guides on Tom's Hardware) but to no avail.
Eventually, I stumbled across Active@ Partition Recovery for Windows, and following a few online tutorials, I was able to scan the drive and detect all three of my partitions as well as preview some of my files, confirming that there must be something wrong with the partition table/MBR.
So here comes my problem: In the tutorials, people were able to simply select the files under preview and recover them from there, but I was not given the recover option when I tried to do so. There were instructions on how to recover partitions and make them visible to the OS again, however when I attempted to recover any partition, I was given an error about a damaged MBR with invalid partition values.
Using the FixMBR feature of Active@, the program loaded something for a while, then the log said that MBR repair was successful, yet nothing had changed; all partitions were still inaccessible from the OS and attempting to recover each partition still resulted in the error about damaged MBR.
This brings me to my frustrating problem: If the program could detect all partitions as well as files being intact, why is the recovery option not enabled? And why does the FixMBR feature do nothing at all? (I understand the MBR may be used for booting an OS, but none of the partitions had operating systems installed, so I can only assume that the MBR was used to map the partitions on the drive).
The drive contains almost a decade's worth of files (the drive itself is only about 5 years old) that are irreplaceable and I would very much appreciate any help to recover access to them.
I have a 400 GB Freecom external hard drive that had three partitions (one NTFS, two FAT) which I use on my laptop (Macintosh, dual-boots Windows 7). Recently, one of the FAT partitions started having issues where it would not mount or be visible when connected to the laptop when booted under OS X, whereas it worked fine under Windows. After I did some partition resizing, suddenly the drive disconnected and all partitions became unreadable on both operating systems.
Using various disk managers, all of them said that the drive did not have any partitions, and that all space was "unallocated". None of the tools (EaseUS, Minitool) would detect any of my data on the drive and as far as they are concerned, the drive was empty. I have followed a few tutorials through Googling (including a number of guides on Tom's Hardware) but to no avail.
Eventually, I stumbled across Active@ Partition Recovery for Windows, and following a few online tutorials, I was able to scan the drive and detect all three of my partitions as well as preview some of my files, confirming that there must be something wrong with the partition table/MBR.
So here comes my problem: In the tutorials, people were able to simply select the files under preview and recover them from there, but I was not given the recover option when I tried to do so. There were instructions on how to recover partitions and make them visible to the OS again, however when I attempted to recover any partition, I was given an error about a damaged MBR with invalid partition values.
Using the FixMBR feature of Active@, the program loaded something for a while, then the log said that MBR repair was successful, yet nothing had changed; all partitions were still inaccessible from the OS and attempting to recover each partition still resulted in the error about damaged MBR.
This brings me to my frustrating problem: If the program could detect all partitions as well as files being intact, why is the recovery option not enabled? And why does the FixMBR feature do nothing at all? (I understand the MBR may be used for booting an OS, but none of the partitions had operating systems installed, so I can only assume that the MBR was used to map the partitions on the drive).
The drive contains almost a decade's worth of files (the drive itself is only about 5 years old) that are irreplaceable and I would very much appreciate any help to recover access to them.
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