5TB drive only showing as 561.53GB

If the OP wants I can pull this thread to the century mark

TV2 said:

FWIW
I have a Toshiba 5TB X300 hard drive in this system. Bought it February 2019.
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Attachment 285415

Can't tell you anything about whether this disk has an AF designation on the drive.
But I installed the drive brand new, out of the box, into a working system (OS on NVME), and initialized it GPT, created partitions, and formatted without a second thought.

I'm not sure about the idea that all X300 drives are the AF type.

@TV2

Not sure about the idea that all x300 drives are the AF type??

Now make sure.

From an elevated command prompt, type

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo <drive letter>

You will see

Total Sectors - 9,767,538,687(4.5TB)
Bytes per Sector: 512
Bytes per Physical Sector: 4096
So it is a 512e AF disk ( Internal) (Thanks to ArthurDent for enlightening me)

Post a screenshot for all of us to see and confirm.

Just for info ...

I ran Recuva on the 5TB drive asking it to look for 'all files' and it took 13+ hrs to recover approx 1,700,000 files!

Looking at the list, a lot were marked 'unrecoverable' and quite a lot were marked 'excellent'.

I don't fancy going through a list of over one and a half million items, so re-scanning to look for documemts - eg .doc and .xls for example.

That's a problem I guess with these very large hard disks - and similarly with commands like chkdsk /r which take bloomin' ages!

jumanji said:

Not sure about the idea that all x300 drives are the AF type??

Now make sure.

From an elevated command prompt, type

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo <drive letter>

You will see

Total Sectors - 9,767,538,687(4.5TB)
Bytes per Sector: 512
Bytes per Physical Sector: 4096
So it is a 512e AF disk ( Internal) (Thanks to ArthurDent for enlightening me)

Post a screenshot for all of us to see and confirm.

@jumanji

You don't want me to run this again do you?

Art

Hi ArthurDent,

My query was addressed to TV2 and not you.

TV2 had said that he has one Toshiba x300 5TB disk bought in Feb 2019, which he initialised as GPT and formatted. He is not sure that all x300 disks are AF. So I have requested him to run the fsutil just as you did and post the screenshot. because seeing is believing.

I thought you were not interested in data recovery. If you are interested in data recovery , then run the trial version of the GetDataback and scan your 5TB disk. Data Recovery Software Products - Runtime Software Products There are four levels of scan 1 to 4. If scan 1 doesn't list your files , then scan 2, 3 and 4 in that order. Each higher level will take more time. And yes, on a 5TB Hdd it will take a longtime. If you are hell-bent on recovering whatever you can you have to go through the gruelling process. If GetDataback shows your files, you can open and preview those'to check the file integrity.. The Trial version will only show you the files. To copy the files however, you have to buy a license. Don't bother to buy rightaway..

If you are happy with the integrity of the files shown by Getdataback, then you can use freeware TestDisk to scan and try to get the files. This will again be a long process that will require a lot of patience and perseverence. If Getdataback shows your files you have 90% chance of getting those files with TestDisk. If you fall in the unlucky 10% then only Getdataback (USD 80) or Active@ File Recovery (USD28) your last option.

I always start off the Data recovery process telling the OPs that nothing is guaranteed and jumanji is no magician with a magic wand ..

@jumanji

Thanks for that clarification. I thought that you didn't mean to run the fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo <drive letter> command again as it wouldn't show anything different from before (post #77 link).

Regarding data recovery on the 5TB disk, it was really to see what, if anything, Recuva could recover. As all of my data (files/documents/photos/videos/music, etc) is also on a separate (2TB) hard disk and I can access that data by attaching the disk to the PC via USB, booting to a Linux Live CD and browsing the disk, I don't need to recover the data on the 5TB drive.

That said, roughly 40-45% of the files recovered appeared to be 'unrecoverable', roughly 40-45% 'excellent' and the remainder problematic ('poor' ?), however the filenames of a lot of files had changed from things like 'Jack Xmas 2019.jpg' or 'B&Q Order 02.01.20.doc' to a meaningless 'ag6Dksue54shppX.jpg' or 'pCV67xs6aePTXg2.doc' or other such incomprehensible rubbish. I balked at the thought of looking at each and every one of these recoverable files and deciding whether or not I wanted to keep them. Far better to copy the individual folders and their contents from the 2TB drive en-mass.

When I've scanned the 5TB drive for a second time for just documents (currently 90 mins in, found 459,275 files and estimated 10h to go) and see if that is any better (in terms of filenames) and started the process of recovering the files and folders from the 2TB drive, I'll wipe the free space on the 5TB to start over as a purely data drive.

Two questions if I may.

1) Can you recommend a (free) secure wipe program - FileShredder or Eraser perhaps?

2) Can I apply drive encryption to just the 5TB data drive and not the 240GB SSD System Disk?

If I can, is this best done as part of a formatting process or can this be activated once the drive has started to be populated with files and folders (or doesn't it matter?)

Art

jumanji said:

@TV2

Not sure about the idea that all x300 drives are the AF type??
Now make sure.
From an elevated command prompt, type

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo <drive letter>

You will see
Total Sectors - 9,767,538,687(4.5TB)
Bytes per Sector: 512
Bytes per Physical Sector: 4096
So it is a 512e AF disk ( Internal) (Thanks to ArthurDent for enlightening me)

Post a screenshot for all of us to see and confirm.

Hi Jumanji
Yes I can do that. Not straight away, but soon.
We will see, but I'm sure you are correct.

If I were a true geek I would just pull the disk out and look at it!
But not on a Monday!

Yes, it is confirmed.
_


It's the same configuration on the remaining 2 partitions.

Curious: can you run ntfsinfo on whole disk or just the partitions (Drive letters)?

@ArthurDent- @jumanji -

If you create a new thread, under System Security, I will discuss the best practice methods of sanitizing the drive.