[MJM]

So basically my external 500 gigs HDD just suddenly messed up and was no longer accessible so I thought maybe it broke... so I used the WD tools and that said it was in superb condition... BS! Anyways after much research I found out that maybe the partition table is what is broken, so I found the app from the title and ran the trial version. It found the partition and seemed intact completely. So instead of letting it finish the scan I went ahead and bought the software (windows + dos package) for a massive fifty dollars... that's a seriously high amount, but the data is worth it.

I don't know why I always have to tell stories... Anyways, it found two partitions for whatever reason... I tried to recover the partition I want, but I get a warning along the lines of "there's already a partition where oyu are trying to recover this one to etc", so now I'm not sure what to do. I guess that doesn't actually fix the partition table, but instead is there to safe partitions someone accidentally deleted?
So I guess there's something else I should do? Fix the MBR? I do have that option and it says it creates a typical MBR, will I be able to access the partition again? It's so confusing and the helpfile is useless.

[philthomas]

What's the app ?

[MJM]

As in the title.
Active Partition Recovery.

[philthomas]

I take it you have checked the User Manual

What drive were you attempting to recover the partition to ?

[MJM]

Yes, have you looked at it, it has horrible English and doesn't really explain much. Well, eventually I went for create typical MBR, but that did nothing. Little did I know I have to reboot so that it performs a chkdsk and does whatever it does (delete orphan file?) and now 200 gigs are gone, but the drive can be seen again. Now I'm using file recovery to get at the stuff again, hopefully most of it.
A pain this is indeed.