Navigating the Challenges of Data Recovery on a TOSHIBA MQ04ABF100 Hard Drive

In today’s digital landscape, data loss can happen to anyone, often when least expected. If you find yourself in a similar predicament with your TOSHIBA MQ04ABF100 (1 TB) hard drive, particularly in an Acer Aspire A514-53G, you’re not alone. This post details a personal experience, highlighting the steps taken for recovery and the challenges faced along the way.

The Initial Setup

My hard drive initially functioned as a basic disk featuring an EFI partition for boot operations and an NTFS partition designated as “Data (E:).” The intention was to install a Linux distribution, specifically FreeBSD, alongside the rEFInd bootloader. However, after encountering issues with the bootloader configuration, I made the decision to remove the EFI partition and expand the NTFS partition using Windows Disk Management. Unfortunately, this action turned the drive into a dynamic disk, inadvertently generating two separate “Data (E:)” partitions.

Attempting to Revert to a Basic Disk

Facing the need to revert the disk back to its original basic state, I discovered that Microsoft’s documented process for doing so would erase all data on the drive—a daunting prospect. My first attempt involved using NIUBI Partition Editor, but the option to convert the dynamic disk back to basic simply was not available.

A user on Reddit kindly recommended using TestDisk, though my experience showed that it was rather slow when run on Windows. To expedite the process, I booted GParted Live from a USB flash drive. GParted revealed that the two “Data (E:)” partitions were labeled as “LDM data partition,” a clear indicator that further action was needed.

The Recovery Efforts

After launching TestDisk, I opted to run the “Analyse” function on the NTFS partition and subsequently wrote the new partition table to the disk. Despite this effort, the data remained inaccessible on both Linux and Windows systems.

In a bid to revive the lost data, I utilized TestDisk to copy the backed-up NTFS boot sector to the main NTFS boot sector—yet, my attempts were met with failure. A further effort involved employing the “Rebuild BS” function, letting it run for a daunting two hours, but it yielded little to no progress.

As a result, I was left with 221 MiB of unallocated space, alongside a