1tb hard drive shows as a 32mb RAW drive after installing Windows on a separate SSD.

[Saber15]

Long story short, I bricked my install of Windows 7 Professional (64bit) on the 1tb Seagate HDD to the point where it was unrecoverable, so I bought a 240gb SSD and installed Windows on that, which then rendered the 1tb drive unreadable on every computer I've plugged it into.

What's weird is that until I installed Windows on the SSD, the 1TB hard drive was still readable; I could access all my files when I had it plugged into an old Vista computer for troubleshooting the Windows install. However, once I installed the SSD and Windows, it rendered the drive unreadable as a RAW drive with a 32mb capacity. It didn't affect the [I]other[/I] 1tb hard drive (consisting almost entirely of video files) which is an identical model that was also plugged in while installing Windows.

HDD Capacity Restore refused to detect any drives besides the CD-ROM when I had it run on the Vista (won't run on 64 bit systems), and most other file recovery systems like EaseUs try pulling data off the RAW partition, which only has a couple FONT files on it.

This is what TestDisk has to say about it:
[t]http://i.imgur.com/mfJg07V.png[/t]

[Darkimmortal]

I've successfully used GetDataBack (Classic, ignore the new Simple edition) in a similar situation, where shit like TestDisk was useless due to the partition table and various NTFS internals being hosed

Its ability to recover directory structure is nothing short of black magic

[butre]

I would suggest using a Linux live cd to format that drive

[Saber15]

[QUOTE=Darkimmortal;48245048]I've successfully used GetDataBack (Classic, ignore the new Simple edition) in a similar situation, where shit like TestDisk was useless due to the partition table and various NTFS internals being hosed

Its ability to recover directory structure is nothing short of black magic[/QUOTE]

When I use GetDataBack NTFS on the drive, all I see are $MFTMirr (size 4096, full of FONT files) and $Volume (size 0)
What does this mean?

$MFTMirr size 4096 attrib ___sh___ clusters 00000002 sectors 2064
$volume size 0 attrib ____sh____ clusters RESIDENT sectors none

[editline]19th July 2015[/editline]

[QUOTE=butre;48245842]I would suggest using a Linux live cd to format that drive[/QUOTE]

Wouldn't this wipe the drive?

[butre]

[QUOTE=Saber15;48248285]
Wouldn't this wipe the drive?[/QUOTE]

yes. the data is currently inaccessible anyway, right? if recovery methods aren't working, saving the hardware is all you can do

[subenji]

Assuming your HDD hasn't had a hardware failure, this may help - but I think it's destructive
[url]http://blog.atola.com/restoring-factory-hard-drive-capacity/[/url]

[editline]20th July 2015[/editline]

I suspected you'd just lost your MBR, but TestDisk is usually able to recover such an event.
You could try fixing the MBR but with the drive reporting the wrong capacity I'm doubtful it'll work.
[url]https://neosmart.net/wiki/fix-mbr/[/url]

[birkett]

I've seen this a few times before - in all cases, the drive was faulty. In most of the cases, it was a Seagate drive.

[lavacano]

Assuming the actual partition and filesystem is intact, you can recover your partition table. Tools exist for this. I've actually done it after an attempt to move a partition to the beginning of my drive failed.