MBR partition recovery from GPT drive

A forum on data recovery using the professional data recovery software R-STUDIO.
13psycho13

MBR partition recovery from GPT drive

Post by 13psycho13 » Wed Sep 21, 2011 11:18 pm

I have the following situation

I have a 3TB Hitachi drive that I bought for the new system. I had to give away my old pc and connected the drive to it to back up files.
Then I of course found out about the whole 2+TB dilemma and everything went downhill.

Disk Manager in Vista on old PC only saw the 746GB drive instead of full 3tb, That was to be expected, I didn't give it a second thought and simply created an ntfs partition for the full 746gb and started backing up files. Everything copied without a problem. (around 400+GB of data)

I removed the drive and later connected to my new system. Then I ran into a lots of problems with my Win7 hanging and not loading with the drive connected. Long story short I cannot examine the drive inside of Windows and must go to preboot options. After trying different programs (all non-invasive, just trying to read the drive), I came to R-Studio. It sees the drive through the Emergency Agent as a proper 2.73TB which is fine. It also sees the Microsoft Reserved partition on it and the Basic Data Partition at 746.39GB with a start at 129mb showing NTFS file system and label "New Volume". I cannot view files it gives an I/O error.

Trying to scan from the beginning starts finding information but at 2.97gb i keep getting "I/O error after 2 times" message. I just canceled and tried from 100gb to 140gb and it scans without IO errors so far. Speed is of course an issues as scanning a 746gb will take quite a while.

I would like your advise as to proper way to tackle my issue in recovering the data. It was a straight write to a new drive nothing was overwritten and in my understanding data should be clean and in excellent condition. I was hoping to get a nicely recognized file structure in green that should make an easy recovery, but after the initial 3gb scan got a red.

If there is any advice as to approach the recovery in my case I would appreciate it. I am on a demo now and ready to buy asap, just want to make sure I am on the right path.

Thanks for your time.