You would need Active@ Partition Recovery Enterprise or Active@ File Recovery Enterprise for to use to recover the data. Also EaseUS Data Recovery or ParttionRecoveryEnterprise from LSoft would be good for such job.
First needs a computer that can operate continuously ... for weeks (2 TB!) All the specialized companies that do this job require a lot of money (per GB)
short of getting another external drive to save the recovered files. Maybe get the files you REALLY want to your system drive and either burn them to dvd or usb sticks and continue to shuffle them to dvd/usb OR take one for the team and get what you REALLY want and work on getting what you lost back again, if attainable.
First off... if Windows did want to initialize your disk, your HDD already had a broken MBR, if you had chosen MBR instead of GPT nothing would have changed eitherway, it would still not work. Use TestDisk to recover your Partition Table.
I had same issue with my Toshiba 2tb usb3 external drive. the drive came up as RAW after booting up one day. I was able to recover ALL of the contents (505Gb) by using "Parted Magic 2012-10-10: Linux based rescue environment" from Hirens boot cd 15.2, Linux can read RAW drives and access them so I copied all the contents to another drive, formatted my 2Tb, and copied it all back to it in about 2hrs. Unfortunately as S1ave77 said "First he needs a drive capable of taking all the restored data". hope this might help
Parted Magic this is the solution? i want to know... @ ian82 please can you try and then tell as the result....
Do not waste your time restoring Data onto a second drive, you only need to fix your Partition Table manually or via a program like TestDisk. Doing this will not overwrite your Data and your hdd will appear as nothing had happend. You may need to quick format it back to MBR if it's really GPT now, then try to recover the partition table.
how if the disk is formatted (quick method) already? pls provide me with step by step instructions I am a n00bi3
I have a better idea why don't you actually TRY and run some of the suggested programs they won't do any harm until you actually commit (partition recovery for example) you will never know until you run such software and they scan your drive and give info.
quick format only removes the journal, all the files are there just waiting to be overwritten. They are there but the space they use is being shown to the system as available space. If you can resist adding data to it, the files should be safe from being overwritten.
Why not create a bit-by-bit dump of the USB stick first? (using dedicated tools like dd, hddrawcopy etc.) Then work either on the USB stick (in order to fix partitions) or on the local, high-speed-access copy (once salvaging files is the only chance left)... It should be the very first step of any repair/fix attempt - backup, backup, backup, prior to screwing things up.
Google for Active boot disk it has a suite of utilities. first thing you should try is a partition recovery. P.M. sent
I tried Active@ Boot Disk but when I booted from the Boot Disk for Windows it wouldn't even recognize my USB drives Active@ Undelete Professional helped me recover 75% of my data, the first 25% I can't even find it anywhere Oh well, better than nothing. But I loved about Active @ Undelete is that it preserved the original file names and they all worked flawlessly (about 750 GB of data saved)