Hard Drive seems corrupt. 1 Partition now showing as 3 Partitions?

Yes thank you for everything. I did tick the solved, didnt seem to work for me. All good regardless.
FWIW I have now done this with 2 older drives successfully. Although I had to use a 3rd party recovery software to retrieve the data.

jumanji said:

Hi mfx,

Hold on for some more time. Do not do anything.

Your 3TB Elements drive is most probably an advance formatted 4096 Bytes per sector size MBR drive. The electronics ( SATA to USB bridge) inside the enclosure has a special drive Translation circuitry that converts the data stream from 4096 sectors to 512 Bytes data stream and presents it to the OS. If you take it out of the enclosure that drive translation is lost.

If you want to recover the data the right course would be to use TestDisk, check what sector size is shown and if it is 512 bytes change it to 4096 bytes per sector and ask it to read the data.

You will only be mucking up the drive by converting it to GPT.

Please check the external enclosure case and let me know whether it carries the AF Logo.

Thanks a lot for this! I have a Seagate SRD00F2 4TB drive. And today it started making a weird noise, I turned it off and then checked later and I couldn't see anything inside the drive.

I opened the external enclosure and tried with a different drive it still made the same sound so it was the controller not the hard drive which gave me hope. I put the hard drive in a different enclosure and it said I should format it.

I followed your instructions now using TestDisk and it is working great and recovering all my data!

Thanks a lot for this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I just registered to say thanks!