testdisk shows directory in red with no contents

Using TestDisk to undelete files
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Author
mjdo
Posts: 1
Joined: 20 Jul 2017, 06:23

testdisk shows directory in red with no contents

#1 Post by mjdo »

Hi all,
I'm helping a friend recover some data.
I've used ddrescue to create an image of the partition in question. No errors at all. So far so good. No hardware faults as far as we know.
What had happened was an accidental "rm -rf *" in too high a directory. The ddrescue was performed immediately; no other writes occurred.
testdisk 6.14 finds the directories such as "Documents" at the top level ok. All files and directories are red. When I use the right arrow to move into Documents, there are no files shown there.
If I use `:` to select the directory, the directory stays red. So I move up onto the directory and press lower case 'c' to copy that directory Documents. The next screen allows me to choose the destination no problem. When I proceed to copy, the message almost instantly returned is "finished! 0 ok, 0 failed".
I was hoping testdisk could recover all the deleted files in the Documents directory and any directory below that.
Can testdisk only recover files it displays in its file and directory navigator?
Is Documents being completely empty a sign that everything is lost, or might there be hope?
I'm aware of photorec and foremost and am using those too but just wanted to leave no stone unturned.
Many thanks!
Matt

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cgrenier
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Re: testdisk shows directory in red with no contents

#2 Post by cgrenier »

What is the filesystem type ?
For ext3 and ext4, testdisk can list the filename of the deleted files but can not recover them. You have to used PhotoRec instead.

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