I have an Lenovo 120 GB external hard drive.
I copied all my data from my laptop onto it which pretty much filled
it up bar a few spare MB's (yes supid thing to do I know but I didn't
have any other option. My situation - the night before I was leaving
Japan to go to China. I'm doing a world trip by bicycle and didn't
have access to any other computers)
It didn't seem a problem until I plugged the drive back in later where
although windows recognised I'd attached a drive (using USB) it
refused to read it & kept giving me the error message that "the drive
is not formatted, would you like to format it now?". I plugged the
external drive into another PC and got the same message.
Searches on the internet came up with Testdisk as a solution so I
downloaded version 6.8 and ran it using the No log/intel PC/Analyse
parameters. (I chose the no log option as I wasn't sure where the log
would be created - I didn't want it to be created on the external
drive as it was full enough already.) It found the partition
successfully & reported "structure: ok" so I went ahead with the
"Write partition structure to disk" function & rebooted as instructed.
After rebooting the problem remained.
I ran testdisk again but this time I received the message
"warning: bad ending head <CHS and LBA don't match>
Then "warning: the correct number of heads per cylinder is 16 but the
correct value may be 255. You can use the geometry menu to change this
value. It's something to try if
- some partitions are not found by testdisk
- or the partition table cannot be written because partitions
overlaps"
I never partitioned the disk so I shouldn't have any overlaps or
missing partitions.
I have never done anything like this before and cannot find any step
by step instructions for using the geometry option.
Can anyone make a recommendation. If I was back home I would send the
drive to a data recovery company (I'm not rich but the data is
priceless to me) but as I am travelling in China for the next 2 months
and then onwards into SE Asia I don't have the luxardy of that option.
Like everyone who loses data I would be eternally grateful for any
recommendations.
Stani
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