Can I recover my 4TB SATA HDD accidentally re-initialized with MBR?

Question

I changed my 4TB SATA HDD to a different 3.5 inch USB enclosure.

When plugging the new enclosure's USB cable into my Windows 7 x64 PC, in the Disk Management MMC, it asked to be initialized with MBR, and I consented. I now have two 1.8TB drives without data.

Is there a way to go back to a GPT partition table and recover the data that was originalky on the drive?

Solution 1

testdisk, a popular open-source tool to search for and salvage partition metadata, may be able to help you here. While other tools (such as Recuva or photorec, the latter being from the same company that makes testdisk) will search your partitions for traces/remnants of your files and attempt to rescue them, testdisk will search for lost/overwritten information about where your partitions were originally located and what their structure was like (filesystem, start sector, length, etc).

If you're lucky, testdisk might be able to simply virtually undo all changes you made by either rebuilding or recovering the GPT structure.

If you've written data to the disk (other than simply creating a new, incorrect MBR), your odds of recovering the data are considerably reduced.

Solution 2

It's possible that the GPT backup data, and maybe even the primary GPT data, remain intact. If so, my GPT fdisk (gdisk) utility should be able to recover the original partitions. See the gdisk documentation's page on data recovery for some basic information and advice.

Two important caveats:

• Switching external enclosures can change the way the disk looks to the computer. In particular, some enclosures translate from 512-byte logical sectors to 4096-byte logical sectors. If your first enclosure did such a translation but the new one doesn't (or vice-versa), or if either enclosure does something else unusual, you'll need to put the physical disk back in its original enclosure before this will work.
• If Windows "formatted" the new partitions, chances are critical data structures from the original filesystems will be overwritten. This may make it difficult to recover anything from the disk. Running CHKDSK (or its GUI equivalent) may help, or you may need to run a file-scanning tool on the disk. The only such tool I know anything about is PhotoRec, but there may be Windows-specific tools that will do a better job on NTFS volumes.

Note that partitions are just chunks of the disk, as defined in a partition table. Filesystems are more complex data structures that are typically stored within partitions. Although many tools manipulate both together, they're different data structures, and understanding this distinction can be critical for data recovery. In particular, gdisk is a partitioning tool that doesn't touch filesystem data, so gdisk may be able to help with the partitioning issue, but if there's filesystem damage gdisk can't help with that.

Comments

[Ramhound]

Look into how to restore the partition data if you cannot do that then the original data lost. In the future you know that MBR disks can not support 4TB Disks