Recover data from external drive with no partition table.

Using TestDisk to undelete files
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Author
WekK
Posts: 1
Joined: 18 Mar 2020, 14:29

Recover data from external drive with no partition table.

#1 Post by WekK »

I have an external drive that has no partition table (I think that's the term, sorry I am new to this). I mistakenly selected this drive when I was trying to format a USB drive. The drive shows up as unallocated in Disk Management. Commercial software is able to list all the files and PhotoRec is able to recover all files. I am trying to use Testdisk to recover all the files with their intact names and possibly their tree directory. I tried analyzing the disk with Testdisk but it won't list the partition with all the files. The only files I can list and recover are BOOTX64.EFI and GRUBX64.EFI. Is there something I am missing/not doing properly? Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

I can't post the Testdisk analysis, didn't know it was going to be overwritten if I tried to do another analysis (thought it would either create a new log or append the it to the old log. Here is the log for PhotoRec, not sure if it would help.


Sun Mar 15 13:22:19 2020
PhotoRec 7.1, Data Recovery Utility, July 2019
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
https://www.cgsecurity.org
OS: Windows 8 (9200)
Compiler: GCC 4.9, MinGW 3.11
ext2fs lib: none, ntfs lib: 10:0:0, ewf lib: 20140608, libjpeg: libjpeg-turbo-1.3.1
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\PhysicalDrive0)=256060514304
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\PhysicalDrive1)=5000981077504
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\PhysicalDrive2)=2000365289472
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\C:)=254471797760
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\D:)=5000770093056
filewin32_getfilesize(\\.\Z:) GetFileSize err Incorrect function.


filewin32_setfilepointer(\\.\Z:) SetFilePointer err Incorrect function.


Warning: can't get size for \\.\Z:
Partition table type (auto): EFI GPT
Disk \\.\PhysicalDrive0 - 256 GB / 238 GiB (RO) - THNSF5256GPUK TOSHIBA
check_part_gpt failed for partition
3 P MS Reserved 70 61 56 72 71 63 32768 [Microsoft reserved partition]
0 0000 0000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Unknown 0 0 1 31130 233 63 500118192 [Whole disk]
1 P Windows Recovery Env 0 32 33 57 126 5 921600 [Basic data partition]
2 P EFI System 57 126 6 70 61 55 204800 [EFI system partition]
3 P MS Reserved 70 61 56 72 71 63 32768 [Microsoft reserved partition]
4 P MS Data 72 72 1 31010 12 40 497015230 [Basic data partition]
NTFS, blocksize=4096, 254 GB / 236 GiB
5 P Windows Recovery Env 31010 38 5 31130 190 36 1937408
0 0000 0000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Partition table type (auto): EFI GPT
Disk \\.\PhysicalDrive2 - 2000 GB / 1862 GiB (RO) - WD My Passport 0827
check_part_gpt failed for partition
1 P MS Reserved 0 0 35 2 10 8 32734 [Microsoft reserved partition]
0 0000 0000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Unknown 0 0 1 243197 57 60 3906963456 [Whole disk]
1 P MS Reserved 0 0 35 2 10 8 32734 [Microsoft reserved partition]
0 0000 0000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

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