I have a 250-gig hard drive that is currently inaccessible, with close to 200 gigs used space. I stupidly used a random shareware program to back up another partition from another computer onto it, and now it looks like the NTFS partition table is gone. Instead of reading 250 gigs of NTFS partitioned space, my computer and every other computer reads the drive as 55 gigs of FAT partitioned space, with 177 gigs of unpartitioned space. In addition, if I try to open the "partitioned" drive on my computer, Explorer lists the files on the FAT partition that I tried to back up, even though the FAT files aren't really there.
It seems to me that the program overwrote the NTFS partition information, and instead replaced it with the FAT partition information from the drive I tried to back up. In addition, it seems that the 55 gigs of FAT partitioned space is really the empty space on the harddrive, and the 177 gigs of unpartitioned space is really the NTFS data. I could be wrong, but this is what seems to be the case. The lucky thing about that is that I can run Windows with the harddrive plugged in, as the data is on what the operating system reads as unpartitioned space.
For a month and a half, I have been working on restoring this data. Most programs haven't been able to recover it, but I finally achieved partial success with Ontrack's EasyRecovery. It can read the harddrive raw, ignoring the allocation tables, and it will scan the data for user-specified file signatures.
Most common file signatures are pre-loaded into the program, but Nero's CD image format (.nrg) is not. Since half of the hard drive is filled with .nrg CD backups, I need to find out the file signature for .nrg files burned with version 5 of Nero. I do not know much about file singatures (in fact, I didn't know what they are until recently), let alone do I know how to find a file signature using a hex editor. Also, the program asks for an offset along with each file signature, although I am not sure what kind of offset they are looking for.
Here is a screenshot of the program:
http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~tlam2/Screenshot.JPG
My question is thus: How can I determine the file signature and offset of a .nrg (version 5) CD image? I have looked online for many hours, and have not been able to find it.
Alternatively, is there an easier way to recover the files? Preferably a solution that would not require me purchasing another hard drive. As it is now, I must copy the files onto the new hard drive, format the corrupted drive, and copy the files back onto the original drive.
Any help would be extremely appreciated; as I have said before, I've been working on recovering this hard drive for over a month and a half now. Thank you.
Linear Mode
