Data recovery

I have a hard drive here that has a SMART warning "imminent failure" upon boot. I hooked it up as a secondary drive and booted to a healthy OS on a healthy drive. The failing drive does not show up in "My Computer", but it does appear in the Disk Management Console as a "GPT Protective Partition". I've done a bit of research on this but can't really make sense out of what I've found, but it seems to be associated with WinXP Pro X64. According to the owner of the drive, it was not on a 64bit PC. I've tried accessing the data using various methods including booting to Knoppix, but it did not recognize the drive as a useable device, and I don't know enough about using Knoppix/Linux to do anything other than just checking to see if the drive was accessible.... so..... what is this "GPT Protective Partition" and how do I copy the data from it?

Thanks!

 

Seagate:-

 

dlb,

Please post whatever the outcome of this as it has me researching for two days. I'd never heard of it myself until your post and am intrigued. I'd already read the link that satrow posted and bunches of others. Ran across one where a guy with 32 bit XP managed to do it to his own hard drive but had no idea of how he had did it.

Was the disk that you are referring to a primary boot disk or a secondary disk in the original system? Was the healthy system that you hooked it up to running XP 64 bit, Vista, or later?

From my research, it would seem that the best bet using only Windows would be to format a blank hard drive using at least XP 64 ( Vista and Win7 32 bit have the function built in, according to reading ) using the format with MBR choice. Hook all up to a system, XP 64 bit or later, and all should be visible and data copying should be possible.

Please take this with a grain of salt as I don't have any 64 bit XP , Vista, or Win7 platforms to try it on. Just what I gathered from research, and hope that it helps.

Also noticed this mentioned several times, but it isn't freeware. http://majorgeeks.com/R-Studio_d1031.html.

 

I hooked up the drive on the secondary SATA channel, and ended up using EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard which was free via a MajorGeeks promo a while back (if I remember correctly). It picked up the partition and all the data is visible in the GUI and I simply backed everything up to an external drive. It took some time to copy 45gb, but it's all there! I tried 3 other data recovery tools before trying EASEUS, and none of 'em you see the partition correctly; one of the other apps actually saw two partitions of 31kb each (yeah - that's a K!!!). Weird. So - everything turned out OK!

 

Thanks for replying with the solution!