I need to recover a small partition on a 3TB drive.

[CheckMarc]

With the Windows 10 free upgrade window closing in I really need to see if I can recover this partition. I was ready to just blow this off until I started looking at all the software I've accumulated over the years. The newer version don't really do anything that the version that I have.

It's a Western Digital WD30EZRX-00MMMB0 with the GigaByte BIOS bug problem. The partition is the last one and it's a relatively small partition at the end. It's only 125GB with only about 25GB of data. The drive still reported errors with it's size even though I could access the entire drive. I used SeaTools for DOS and set the drive back to it's original capacity. Now there's nothing. DDRescue, DMDE and Gparted all show the drive being about 800GB. Windows Explorer shows the entire drive but both partition aren't formatted. I have screen captures from DMDE and Gparted along with the log file from DMDE but I can't figure out how to post them.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, Marc.

If this is some kind of BIOS bug, have you tried resetting or updating your BIOS/UEFI?

Perhaps if you try the drive with a different computer you might get better results if this really is some sort of a BIOS issue.
Other than that you could try accessing that partition via Ubuntu Live USB/DVD, to see if it recognizes it properly and if you can get to your data so that you can recover it.
Another option would be data recovery software (as you've already figured that out). Unfortunately I can't recommend a specific data recovery programs, but you can take a look at the suggestions from those 2 links give it a try with some of the options: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html & http://pcsupport.about.com/od/filerecovery/tp/free-file-recovery-programs.htm.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD