Ununderstandable shrink of 3tb to 746gb after crash

[boumay]

I had a crash BSOD yesterday when I was watching a video from drive (F), it was set as dynamic disk. (a raid disk which was then isolated but remained as dynamic)
When I restarted the pc my drive was labeled as invalid in disk management.
I tried what I could until I converted it back from dynamic to basic with diskpart and created a new partition from that.

But now my drive is only 746gb (?!)

There is no way to find the lost partition. I tried many partition managers, from minitool to hdd regenerator, to testdisk, and others. Not any single software is able to find except the 746 gb partition.

How can I get my 3tb back?

Thank you for helping.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, boumay.

It sounds like you don't care about data recovery and you just want to be able to use the full capacity of the drive, is that right? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Would you please post a screenshot of what you see in Disk Management (you can use imgur.com to upload the image).
If you don't care about recovering data, you could try to low level format the drive (a.k.a. Write Zeros) to see if that fixes things up. Note that this would make the data on that drive irretrievable, so please don't do it if you want to recover your data and skip to the part where it says "If you want to recover data". However, if you want to try it out, here's how to do it:
1. Open CMD (Command Prompt) as administrator
2. Type diskpart and press "enter"
3. Type list disk and press "enter"
4. Type select disk X and press "enter" (where X is the number of the drive you wish to low level format, so don't forget to change it - e.g. if the disk is disk 2, you should type "select disk 2")
5. Type clean and press "enter" and wait for the process to finish.

Once you're done close CMD, and open Disk Management. You should be prompted to initialize the drive. Here's how to do that: How to initialize or write a signature to a secondary hard drive or Solid State drive in Windows. Note that you must select "GPT" instead of MBR so that you can use the full capacity of the drive. After that you should be able to partition and format it as you see fit.

Note that if there's an issue with the drive this might not be successful and you should try to test it with its manufacturer's diagnostic tool, to see if there's anything out of the ordinary.

If you want to recover data, you should try the drive with a different computer, to see if the partition is properly recognized. Another option would be to try and access the drive via Ubuntu Live USB, to see if it detects the full capacity of the drive and if you can get to your files. Data recovery software is a viable option as well: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html and http://pcsupport.about.com/od/filerecovery/tp/free-file-recovery-programs.htm. And last, but not least, if all else fails, you could go for a professional solution, such as a data recovery company.

Hope that helps. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Boogieman_WD

 

[boumay]

Hello boogieman,
I just post a thank you quickly because your post is much appreciated, I don't have the time right now, but I'll try what you said and give you feedback.
I want to retrieve the data if possible.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

If you want to try and get your files back, you should disregard the first part and go directly for the data retrieval part of the post. Unfortunately I will be unavailable the next few days, so I'll get my colleague D_Know_WD to check the thread tomorrow, otherwise I'll be back on it first thing Monday morning.

I hope you're able to get your data back. Fingers crossed!

 

[boumay]

Thank you again
I think I'll try the unbutu live usb method and I'll let you know if I was able to recover the data.
If not successful, I'll go nuclear and apply the low level format you mentioned.

 

[boumay]

Ok, so I managed to boot with a live cd of Linux (mint based on unbutu), and the system was able to see the drive with its full capacity, which is good, but not the original partitions (I wish I didn't touch the partition because my data may be lost, but anyway...). The used space was originally 2.25tb approx. and free space 780gb. I can see the partitions don't match. I hope the data is still recoverable.

But sadly I couldn't find a way to tweak the partitions. I downloaded gparted but I'm such a newbie at Linux (don't laugh, it's actually the very first time I launch it in my life, lol) that I couldn't figure out how to start the program.

Here is the screenshot (sorry for the low quality)
http://imgur.com/Goma0Tb

 

[Boogieman_WD]

There's nothing to laugh about. Everybody has to start somewhere. You should not re-partition the drive or format it in anyway unless it's specifically stated that you might be able to do that without losing data. Note that even in this case usually you should backup as there's always a risk that you might lose important files, so it's up to you to decide if you want to risk it.
My hopes were that this OS (Ubuntu) would recognize the partitions and their proper capacity so you could simply copy-paste the data to a different drive and try to recover the problematic HDD's full size afterwards.
As for Gparted, I'd suggest that you go to the official website for further instructions on how to operate with this program or contact their customer support, because unfortunately as an official Western Digital representative, I can't commend on products and devices which are not under the WD brand. 🙁

Please let me know how it goes.

 

[drtweak]

Go back to disk management. In the list of the disk at the bottom you will see your 3TB. It will be something like DISK1 or DISK 2 etc. Where it says that DISK Right click there. Click Convert to GPT Disk. You will now have access to the 3Tb as a whole.

Let me explain what is happening.

For whatever reason sounds like the disk got converted to a MBR Disk which is ONLY supported up to 2TB (2.2TB from HD manufacture terms because 1TB is not 1024GB it is 1000GB so 2048GB come out to 2.2TB from HD makers). So what is happening is when the OS formats a drive larger than 2Tb's that is MBR what it does is what you see is AFTER the 2TB. a 3Tb drive formats to 2.74TB. So it SKIPS the first 2TB and then gives you the rest. Once you switch it to a GPT disk you can then have access to all of the space of any drive over 2TB.

Hope that helps.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Drtweak, hey mate

This is all good and completely true, but this wouldn't help with the data recovery chances. That's why I didn't push for that solution after my first post. So I'd recommend that @boumay refrains from that option for now. Otherwise you'd always had great advice to give and I'd be glad if you look through the thread to see if I might have missed something, which could help with the data recovery.

 

[boumay]

I'm really sorry for the late reply, I didn't receive notification from tomshardware about new posts so I assumed nothing was happening.
Thank you very much everybody for this precious help.
I'll try this as soon as I have the Linux working, (lol I downloaded the Linux mint precisely on feb 20, when some people hacked the server and replace the iso with an infected one with backdoors, so I have to fix that)