worka

I was given a hard drive in a USB cradle that had an NTFS partition(whole disk) on that was "accidentally" removed. Appeared as though the partition table had been re-written to put the partition back . This didn't work and XP wanted to format, and Linux saw it as a bad NTFS partition.

I got TestDisk and ran it under Linux, point it at /dev/sda. TeskDisks initial analysis didn't find a partition but it allowed a deeper analysis which was able to recover the partition information (seemed to say that it was from a backup (I'm working from memory here)). Once I wrote that back to the drive it appeared as to work as it was originally.

Result was, fixed drive and me being impressed.