How to Recover Data from External Hard Drive with Corrupted Partition Table

data-recoveryhard drivelinuxpartitioningusb

I have a WD Elements 5TB USB hard drive that fdisk -l now shows as a single partition of Microsoft basic data:

Device     Start        End    Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sda1   2048 9767473151 9767471104  4.6T Microsoft basic data

The last time I used it it contained 2 partitions in NTFS format as supplied by the manufacturer.

I have no clue as to what corrupted the partition table, but possibly the data is still present on the disk and can be recovered. Can anyone advise me as to procedure to follow, linux tools to do this?

Best Answer

Use Testdisk from www.cg-security.org.

If you don't use legacy operating systems, make sure to set "GPT" in Testdisk.

MBR would only be required for use with a legacy operating system that does not understand GPT and assuming that your disk does not contain converting electronics showing a sector size of 4096 byte instead of 512 byte at the interface.

Related Question