Windows 10 upgrade and whys it doing that moment

Silvaire

Silvaire

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Silvaire
Nothing to do really so my brother talked me into trying to upgrade one of my desktops to Windows 10. I said okay so he set up a bootable USB and cloned my C drive to a new 4TB drive I got at Frys for $89. Well when he did the cloning my 4TB drive dropped to .5 TB with 1.5 TB of unallocated space and I wasn't too happy about that so I cleaned it all off and tried to reformat it back to 4TB but could only get it to show 2.

I had this exact same problem when I first installed it and after trying everything I could gather of the internet the only solution was to just reformat it on the other computer in the garage then reinstall it in the office and all was good.

So I pulled the drive out and plugged it into the other computer and it was still showing the cloned partitions.

So this is the "Why is it doing that?" moment

I cleared all that off and reformatted and now it only has .5 TB so I'm scratching my head when it dawns on me that I pulled the wrong drive out and just completely, in systematic fashion wiped out my entire C drive and it's clone and all the backups I had of it.

Murphy's law - yup, if it can be done sooner or later you're gonna do it. :mad2:
 
Crud, I feel for you. There are a couple of things that could have bitten you. An older BIOS might only recognize 2TB and if it was reformatted with an MBR, instead of a GPT it would be limited to 2 TB.
 
The data is almost certainly recoverable if you haven't putzed with it too much since deleting the partitions.

Rich
 
Yes I just bought a new drive so I can try save some of the stuff on this one. To be honest there's not much of real importance there, nothing that I'm going to pay anyone to try and recover at least, probably time to clean out the file cabinet anyway. I've used Recuva but Adobe can't read any of the pdf's so I'm going to try a corrupted pdf repair program on top of that.

As for the 2TB barrier it's a head scratcher. Definitely GPT and not MBR. The BIOS saw it as 4 but only 2 in Windows. After setting it up on the other computer then transferring it back it comes out as 4 :dunno: I know that if you Google "4TB WD HDD shows 2TB" enough stuff comes up to keep you reading all weekend so I'm not the first one down this path. Anyway that's a problem already solved, in a roundabout way.
 
32-bit or 64-bit Windows? If I remember correctly, 32-bit maxes out around 2TB that is can read anyway.

David
 
flhrci said:
32-bit or 64-bit Windows? If I remember correctly, 32-bit maxes out around 2TB that is can read anyway.

David
Click to expand...

My first thought too - 2 TB is the limit for 32 bit systems. I strongly suspect a 32 bit something somewhere.

Keep in mind that this applies to drivers too. Perhaps you have a 32 bit driver installed / do not have the 64 bit driver.
 
Both computers are 32 bit and I have 4TB drives on both now. The 2 TB limit is only if you want to boot off of the drive, then you need to set it up as MBR.

Anyone have any suggestions on recovery tools or software? Recuva ain't doing it for me.
 
Silvaire said:
Both computers are 32 bit and I have 4TB drives on both now. The 2 TB limit is only if you want to boot off of the drive, then you need to set it up as MBR.

Anyone have any suggestions on recovery tools or software? Recuva ain't doing it for me.
Click to expand...

I dunno. The best data recovery guy I ever knew (R.I.P. Stefan) swore by R-Studio, but that was some years ago. I used it for a while after Stefan passed away, but I haven't done it in years.

I do remember that in cases like yours, sometimes all that had to be done was rewrite the partition table. I believe R-Studio had that functionality. When it worked it was a nice, quick fix.

I also used to do business with a company in Connecticut that was very reliable, but alas, they seem to be out of business.

Rich
 
Let me know when someone can crack the Crypto Virus... I will pay 500 bucks to get back files and pics...
 
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