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I have a little bit of a story. I spilt hot chocolate on my lovely Lenovo Ultrabook and killed it. I fixed it and put a new keyboard in. Windows was running quite slowly so I went to do the Windows 8 reinstall because it was UEFI and it worked. Unfortunately within about 30 minutes it was at 2% so I gave up. Got a USB CD drive and tried to install it that way. There were like 7-8 partitions from my 1TB hdd which I removed.

Before I removed them I was getting an error about not being able to make a partition. Once I removed these I still got the error so I guessed it was the cache drive inside. So I took the cache drive out and Windows worked fine. I was silly. I backed up my documents to the Cache Drives partition which was formatted for Windows (not sure what format). This drive also is for Intel Rapid Storage Technology and there is a setting to turn it off in the BIOS. I've tried this. No luck.

Windows just saids Please Reformat D. I've tried DiskDigger, TestDisk, FixParts, GPart and no luck. They either report wrong size or IO error.

I really need my data back so if anyone could help me that would be amazing.

Jamie
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  • Bit of luck. I turned on RST in my BIOS and GDisk now works. I have no idea how to recover my data with it though. – Jamie Feb 05 '13 at 07:05
  • GDisk reports my MBR and GPT are protective and BSD and APM are not present – Jamie Feb 05 '13 at 07:11
  • Does your disk have a backup GPT (it should on last logical block)? Could you try recover/boot from it? – Heis Spiter Feb 05 '13 at 07:13
  • The Cache has 2 partitions. The cache bit and the data one. How do I find my backup GPT? – Jamie Feb 05 '13 at 07:15
  • It's normally on the last LBA of your disk. So, at its total end. No idea which tool could use it though. Windows (at least 2003) is able to handle a GPT device if only backup GPT is available. – Heis Spiter Feb 05 '13 at 07:18
  • So I'd need to copy the last LBA and set it as the main GPT? – Jamie Feb 05 '13 at 07:26
  • No! They don't carry exactly the same info (regarding LBAs). You've either to boot from backup or to recover main from backup. Windows is able to do both. The best idea is to completely kill the main GPT only when you are sure you have a healthy backup GPT. – Heis Spiter Feb 05 '13 at 07:30
  • You've lost me. I don't think its in GPT anymore. As in when I installed Windows there was no SSD cache as I took it out. – Jamie Feb 05 '13 at 07:37

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This isn't ideal but it was the only solution I could come up with.

I enabled Intel Rapid Storage in my BIOS. Booted up TestDisk and dumped the data partition to a RAW image. Mounted it using OFSMount and then used DiskDigger to get the data from the RAW Image. Unfortunately there are no file names but I have most of my data intact now.

Jamie
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  • Just found out you can mount an image file in DiskDigger reducing the need for OFSMount – Jamie Feb 07 '13 at 14:01