No volumes defined

[kenlaz]

I have a Seagate ST3750330AS (750 GB) hard drive – I had Vista 32 bit Pro installed on this drive– I don’t recall any particular event, but one day it failed.  The drive does not show when I look in the BIOS settings.  I tried running my iRecover Pro version 3.4 on a Bart PE disk.  The drive is listed when enumerating the drives, but the first time I tried, it showed as 0 GB.  Last night I tried again and the capacity was now 698 GB and Status Unknown.  When I went to the next step – which took at least 30 minutes I received a decision box

Invalid partition table

It seems to be no volumes (logical disks) defined in the partition table.  The recovery cannot be performed unless you define one yourself.
Do you want to do define a volume manually now?  If you answer “No” at this time, you may do this later, or it is possible to run an automated discovery procedure to locate any possible remains of the volumes.

I don’t remember if I partitioned this particular drive and I am looking for guidance on how to proceed.  I am afraid to start over since I did get an error the first time out.

1.   Should I say “Yes” or “No”?
2.   Should I run it on another computer with iRecover installed and the bad drive as a slave?
3.   Would Upgrading improve my chances of success?

Thanks

Ken

[Tom]

If you didn't partition the drive, as you say, then nothing will be on it, unless it was part of a RAID set. So I'm assuming you mean something else.

It all sounds like the drive is having physical problems, it might be wise to determine that first. Check the drive's health. You can do this by using the DiskPatch demo version, or be installing the latest iRecover demo and selecting the drive, then right-click and select "SMART information". If you go with the DiskPatch demo version, read this: http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/dp_manual/guide_smartcheck.htm
It actually sounds serious enough to consider cloning the drive, if you really need data from this problem drive.

Upgrading is always a good idea when in an actual recovery situation; lots of things have been improved so you'll probably get a better result with the latest version. Having said that, your version should do fine and you may well decide to upgrade only if things don't work out with your current version. That's all up to you.

[kenlaz]

I meant that I don’t remember if I had more than one partition.  I'm sure the drive is not healthy.

Will DiskPatch be able to clone the drive even when it doesn’t always show - like in the BIOS or the 1st time I ran iRecover?  Does the clone have to be a full drive, or can it be a file or partition of a larger drive?

Just to be clear, your 1st recommendation is to run DiskPatch and not continue the current operation on iRecover.
I left it at the decision box.

[Tom]

My advice was to first verify the state of the disk and then take appropriate actions. If you know for sure that the disk is mechanically faulty, cloning is the only logical next step.

Cloning is always disk-to-disk. You CAN clone part of a disk but that only makes sense if you know the exact size and location of the volume that you want to recover. So if the volume spans the entire disk, you should clone the entire disk. Same in your situation, if you don't know what was on the disk, play it safe and clone it completely.

You can also clone the disk with iRecover ("create image"); the result will be a file the size of the original disk. So you'll need a volume with a lot of space. After that you can work with that file to see if data can be recovered. Keep in mind though that if the disk is showing lots of read problems you would probably be better off with DiskPatch.

DiskPatch can run into the same problems as other systems (Windows etc.) when trying to access the disk; if the disk is in a bad state it may indeed not show up at all. You can use the demo version to test if DiskPatch sees the disk. If so, I'd clone it as quickly as possible. That is, if you need data from this disk. If there's nothing of importance on it you should simply replace it.