Novice trying to recover partitions. Help needed.

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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recuperation
Posts: 2718
Joined: 04 Jan 2019, 09:48
Location: Hannover, Deutschland (Germany, Allemagne)

Re: Novice trying to recover partitions. Help needed.

#11 Post by recuperation »

The message in your last screenshot shows you that the NTFS partition is not accessible (anymore) assuming that you were able to recover exactly this one before.
No you are left with Photorec and other recovery software.
anilswipe wrote: 08 Apr 2021, 05:16 Am I right in changing the type from FAT32 to NTFS in Testdisk and un-selecting the boot option in Gparted and installing the OS and creating the 'TemporaryData' partition from Swap? Or did I mess up things further?
You never write to a drive with data to recover.
If you look at your first posting there was a Linux partition at the location of your new FAT32 partition.
You must have done something to that Linux partition and it won't become the NTFS that is located before even if you change the type. Changing the type does not change the content.

anilswipe
Posts: 8
Joined: 04 Apr 2021, 12:43

Re: Novice trying to recover partitions. Help needed.

#12 Post by anilswipe »

Thanks recuperation,
The message in your last screenshot shows you that the NTFS partition is not accessible (anymore) .... You never write to a drive with data to recover.....
You must have done something to that Linux partition and it won't become the NTFS that is located before even if you change the type. Changing the type does not change the content
.

Oh my... my bad.
No you are left with Photorec
I checked with Photorec. It has searched files and it is saving recovered files. I see that those files are the ones that were on that drive.

I wonder, if Photorec can detect the files, it shows that the files are still intact. Then why can't the partition table be recovrerd with Testdisk using the 'write' option? It would save the sorting of files recovered by Photorec.

Thank you and best regards
Anil

recuperation
Posts: 2718
Joined: 04 Jan 2019, 09:48
Location: Hannover, Deutschland (Germany, Allemagne)

Re: Novice trying to recover partitions. Help needed.

#13 Post by recuperation »

anilswipe wrote: 08 Apr 2021, 13:25 I wonder, if Photorec can detect the files, it shows that the files are still intact. Then why can't the partition table be recovrerd with Testdisk using the 'write' option? It would save the sorting of files recovered by Photorec.
An entry in the partition table is just a pointer to a file system, regardless if it's MBR or GPT.
A working configuration needs a healthy file system as well.

Your file system is a tree where the files are leafs. When your tree is dammaged or gone, Testdisk cannot work as it relies on the tree to find the leafs.
Qphotorec ignores the tree or its remains. It pulls out what looks like a leaf. The leafs extracted by Photorec may be right, partly dammaged or outright wrong. Despite that variation of outcome it is useful to have a tool like Photorec because it can work very well especially in cases of low fragmentation.

anilswipe
Posts: 8
Joined: 04 Apr 2021, 12:43

Re: Novice trying to recover partitions. Help needed.

#14 Post by anilswipe »

Thank you for the wonderful analogy, recuperation. I got the point.

Now I will do one thing. First I will extract the files with Photorec, before they get destroyed too. Then I will try to recover the partitions.

I will come back after that.

Thank you and best regards.
Anil

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