I'm moving away from my 5 drive system to a more simple 2 drive setup: 1 fast SSD and 1 large data drive. So I took my external Western Digital 3TB drive and installed it internally. I have a Seagate 1.5TB hard drive in there that I'd like to transfer all of it's contents onto the 3TB and sell the 1.5TB. Of course, this sounds very easy to do, right? The drives are physically installed correctly. I boot into my Win7 64-bit install flash-drive. When it's time to select a drive, it won't let me install onto either drive, directing me to look at setup.log which I can't find. I finally install onto a laptop drive I had laying around. That installed correctly. But now it's uglier than ever... My 3TB drive is showing up in 2 parts: a 2TB unallocated, and a ~700GB. Thankfully my 1.5TB correctly is showing, which is good. But my 3TB had all our family photos, movies, etc. My wife is really upset and I don't understand how this happened! First thing, no writes to the 3TB. Then I attempted data recovery with: MiniTool Partition Recovery EASEUS Partition Master 9.0.0 Home Edition Find and Mount Acronis Recovery Expert (currently scanning) I haven't written any new bits to the drive and Windows 7 just couldn't install on them for whatever reason. I definitely didn't delete any partitions or drives, as I'm really careful to avoid that. But I remember possibly clicking add a partition, because it looked like there was room to install on the drive. But doing that still didn't let me install. In fact, backing out of that setup supposed to cancel any of those settings. Right now, I'm upset at WD for possibly sending me a improperly formatted drive. In such an event, I must have a very non-typical data recovery situation: a drive that may have a newly added partition to a 100% partition. Please advise. Sincerely, Vincent

From a setupact.log (there's a much longer version of this on the other disk) 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Info [0x0e00cf] TOOL Starting OS Rollback... (launched with command line [/CleanInstallFromWinPE /noui /BTFolder:E:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources]) 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Info [0x0e00d1] TOOL OS Rollback: NoUI switch. 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Info TOOL OS Rollback: Rolling back clean install launched from WinPE... 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Info [0x064149] IBSLIB RollbackExecuteSequence in progress... 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Info [0x064130] IBSLIB ExecuteRollbackSequence: Checkpoint(WinPEBootSectorRestoreCheckpoint) rollback in progress. 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Error [0x06413c] IBSLIB FindVolume: Unable to find volume marked as [$Setup_SystemVolume$] 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Error [0x064225] IBSLIB FindVolume: Failed while looking for [$Setup_SystemVolume$]; hr = 0x80070490. 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Error [0x06416c] IBSLIB BootSectorRestoreCheckpoint: Failed to find system volume; hr = 0x80070490[gle=0x00000490] 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Error [0x064189] IBSLIB RollbackExecuteSequence: threw exception.: class RollbackException: RollbackException: Error(-2147023728), BootSectorRestoreCheckpoint: Failed to find system volume. void __cdecl OSRollbackService::CBootSectorRestoreCheckpoint::Rollback(const unsigned short *) 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Info [0x06414b] IBSLIB RollbackExecuteSequence finished. 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Error [0x0e00cd] TOOL OS Rollback: ExecuteRollback failed. 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Info [0x0e00d2] TOOL PERFORMANCE: OS Rollback took 0 seconds. 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Info [0x0e00d5] TOOL End OS Rollback. From setuperr.log 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Error [0x06413c] IBSLIB FindVolume: Unable to find volume marked as [$Setup_SystemVolume$] 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Error [0x064225] IBSLIB FindVolume: Failed while looking for [$Setup_SystemVolume$]; hr = 0x80070490. 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Error [0x06416c] IBSLIB BootSectorRestoreCheckpoint: Failed to find system volume; hr = 0x80070490[gle=0x00000490] 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Error [0x064189] IBSLIB RollbackExecuteSequence: threw exception.: class RollbackException: RollbackException: Error(-2147023728), BootSectorRestoreCheckpoint: Failed to find system volume. void __cdecl OSRollbackService::CBootSectorRestoreCheckpoint::Rollback(const unsigned short *) 2011-08-28 18:23:01, Error [0x0e00cd] TOOL OS Rollback: ExecuteRollback failed. And on another drive, another setuperr.log 2011-08-28 16:52:37, Error [0x064230] IBSLIB Error creating \\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolume5\Boot\ path! Last Error = 0x48f[gle=0x0000048f] 2011-08-28 16:52:37, Error [0x064230] IBSLIB Error copying boot files from E:\Windows\Boot\PCAT to \\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolume5\Boot! Last Error = 0x48f[gle=0x0000048f] 2011-08-28 16:52:37, Error [0x060227] IBS Callback_UpdateBootFiles: An error occurred while servicing the boot files from [E:\Windows\Boot]; status = 0x8007048F[gle=0x0000048f] 2011-08-28 16:52:37, Error [0x060229] IBS Callback_UpdateBootFiles:An error occurred while copying boot files; status = 0x8007048F.[gle=0x0000048f]

Failed attempt: "Unfortunately Acronis Recovery Expert has not found any volumes in the free spaces you have selected. Please choose another free space to try again. Please click Finish to close the program." Under Computer Management / Storage / Disk Management, it's Disk 1, Basic, Online, unallocated, MBR, Capacity and Unallocated space both at 2861587 MB. No volumes. This has to be a big clue. Not allocated. Not my motherboard's fault. Relevant data for motherboard: Shuttle SG31G2 Socket LGA 775, Chipset Intel G31 North Bridge and a ICH7 South Bridge. So I won't have a successful data recovery if it only scans the 2048 GB and ignoring the 746.52 of the same drive. To properly recover the original drive before the Windows 7 installation errors, I must first unify these 2 unallocated volumes. Then perform a data recovery of some sort. The danger is, I don't want to write over any sectors and destroy the data waiting for me. So I think I must avoid creating any volumes, right? But how do unify without writing over sectors?

I tried to fix by putting the external drive back into the WD enclosure. So now it shows as a USB drive. "You must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it. Select disks: checkbox on only 'Disk 2'. Use the following partition style for the selected disks: MBR Master Boot Record or GPT GUID Partition Table. Note: The GPT partition style is not recognize by all previous versions of Windows. It is recommended for disks larger than 2TB, or disks used on Itanium-based computers." I was afraid to initialize it, that perhaps in doing so, I may accidentally overwrite files on the missing volume. So I simply exited that, and it shows up Disk Management. There under properties it reads status as working properly Type Unknown Status: not initialized Partition Style: Not Applicable Capacity is correct, reserved space empty, still no volume. Good news: Now instead of showing 2 Unallocated volumes, it shows only one! Yes, progress! Time to do a length data recovery. Keep hope alive! I shall update if things go well.

Hi, The issue may be caused by too large space on the External WD driver. I suggest creating partitions on 3TB External WD to check the result. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Create-and-format-a-hard-disk-partition Best Regards, Niki Please remember to click "Mark as Answer" on the post that helps you, and to click "Unmark as Answer" if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Hi, The issue may be caused by too large space on the External WD driver. I suggest creating partitions on 3TB External WD to check the result. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Create-and-format-a-hard-disk-partition Best Regards, Niki Please remember to click "Mark as Answer" on the post that helps you, and to click "Unmark as Answer" if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread. Only true on a 32-bit system, but it is native on a 64-bit. Following your advice will not recover, and will probably lead to permanent data loss. The link you gave included formatting the drive, which will practically ensure the data is lost forever.

I am trying the a few programs specifically for partition recovery. Many of the aforementioned were for data recovery or for partition management, but not partition recovery is very specialized. To that end, I found the following discussion very useful: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/229699-32-erased-partition-external-hard-drive-mistake-help 1. $36 or up Active Partition Recovery http://www.partition-recovery.com/ Can scan the drive for a previous partition and restore the MBR/partition table 2. $79 GetDataBack V4.21 http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm You can also recover the files off the drive to a second drive. Treats the drive as read-only, and writes your recovered data onto a 2nd drive. 3. $79 and up http://www.smartpctools.com/partition_recovery/ Don't know about it... 4. Free! http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm 5. Free! http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

Hi, I am sorry. I just hope the content of creating a new partition (volume) in the article could be helpful. You can right click the External WD drive in Disk Management, select Shrink Volume to create new partition. It won't lose data. Best Regards, Niki Please remember to click "Mark as Answer" on the post that helps you, and to click "Unmark as Answer" if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.