Recovering deleted NTFS: Backup BS or Rebuild BS?

[nicholrg]

While trying to cleanup old Windows-related partitions, I accidentally deleted a partition that held all my backed up data.

On a HDD with 2 partitions I:
1. deleted 100mb partition leftover from previous Windows installation
2. expanded the main partition to encompass that 100mb partition
3. accidentally deleted the main partition

TestDisk found all the partitions after a deep search, but I'm only concerned with recovering the largest partition. I set the partition to Primary and TestDisk now sees it on subsequent TestDisk executions, but to make it accessible to Windows, I need to recover the boot sector. Here, I am confronted with a prompt that I am too ignorant to proceed through:

Code: Select all

Disk /dev/sda - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - CHS 121601 255 63
     Partition                  Start        End    Size in sectors
 1 P HPFS - NTFS             12 223 20 121600 247 55 1953312768
    Previous
Error: size boot_sector 1953515520 > partition 1953312768
Status: Bad

Backup boot sector
Warning: number of heads/cylinder mismatches 224 (NTFS) != 255 (HD)
Warning: number of sectors per track mismatches 19 (NTFS) != 63 (HD)
Status: OK

Sectors are not identical.

A valid NTFS Boot sector must be present in order to access
any data; even if the partition is not bootable.

Should I Backup, Rebuild, or Dump?

[cgrenier]

You can try RebuildBS, List and if you see your files, Write an confirm.

[nicholrg]

Before the original post was approved, I read a bit of the manual and saw the Backup command used and saw that the backup bootsector was "status: OK " so I went ahead and ran Backup. It worked great--partition is restored! I briefly checked a few random files and everything seems to be working.

Thank you both for writing and actively maintaining this tool, and maintaining this active message board.