Help! External HDD partiton recovery HFS+

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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caincha
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Joined: 09 Feb 2013, 04:53

Help! External HDD partiton recovery HFS+

#1 Post by caincha »

Well, a few months back I had to sell my 2008 iMac (C2D w/ Snow Leopard) because I was moving to somewhere 3.000 miles away. No biggie, I had everything on my 3tb external HDD and I can always buy another Mac.
Which I did, I recently bought a Powerbook G4 1,67ghz since I was on a budget and needed a laptop.

The thing is, once I tried to use Tiger to repartition my external HDD like I used to do with Snow Leopard, it's partition table got screwed up! After some reading on the web I found out Tiger's partition scheme is different but it was too late.

So I tried some demos I've downloaded for this task and one of them asked for me to reformat the HDD. Why not, a quick reformat won't really erase anything as long as I don't rewrite it and restore it's partition, right?
Well, that app didn't restore anything and now I have a blank 3tb HDD...

Since then (a month now!) I've been trying anything I can get a demo of the web: Stellar, iPartition, DiskDrill, Disk Warrior, TechTool, Data Rescue, FileSalvage, Yodot, etc. None seems to do what I want, which is to restore my partition table.

I even tried GParted and some Windows alternatives like Partition Guru, Data Recovery HFS+ and like the others I tried on my Mac the closest I got was to recover the files, but I don't have a 3tb HDD to backup everything.

Anyway, what I want is to recover my HDD's partition table like it was before all of this, any suggestion?
And why is it so hard to do that on HFS+? Some 10 years back I had a similar accident with my Windows desktop (NTFS) and I could undo it in a matter of hours including the time I spent looking for answers on the web...

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caincha
Posts: 2
Joined: 09 Feb 2013, 04:53

Re: Help! External HDD partiton recovery HFS+

#2 Post by caincha »

Nops, mine is still standing there, with no use until I can find another 3TB HDD or a tool to recover it's partition table. Or until I get my desktop to let TestDisk work it's magic for as many days as it might take 'cause as of now I can't leave my work laptop just standing there for so long...

If you do have other HDD to spare I would recommend Partition Guru (on Windows) as it does 'see' all your HFS+ files and it does recover to another HDD, but it might take about a day to find everything then another few hours to transfer from one to another.

Best of luck to us both, it seems we'll need it...
y10012 wrote:Hello,

I found myself in a similar situation as yours (I accidentally reinitialized a 2x2tb external hfs drive with all my data, and it overwrote the partition table, and the drive is now blank. The file recovery utilities can see the tens of thousands of files, but without the directory information that is useless. Did you find a way to recover your original partition?

I don't understand why it is so difficult to find a tool that will find the directories on the disk and recover the file structure, at least after the top level of the tree. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated!

Best,
Yannis


Subject: Help! External HDD partiton recovery HFS+
caincha wrote:Well, a few months back I had to sell my 2008 iMac (C2D w/ Snow Leopard) because I was moving to somewhere 3.000 miles away. No biggie, I had everything on my 3tb external HDD and I can always buy another Mac.
Which I did, I recently bought a Powerbook G4 1,67ghz since I was on a budget and needed a laptop.

The thing is, once I tried to use Tiger to repartition my external HDD like I used to do with Snow Leopard, it's partition table got screwed up! After some reading on the web I found out Tiger's partition scheme is different but it was too late.

So I tried some demos I've downloaded for this task and one of them asked for me to reformat the HDD. Why not, a quick reformat won't really erase anything as long as I don't rewrite it and restore it's partition, right?
Well, that app didn't restore anything and now I have a blank 3tb HDD...

Since then (a month now!) I've been trying anything I can get a demo of the web: Stellar, iPartition, DiskDrill, Disk Warrior, TechTool, Data Rescue, FileSalvage, Yodot, etc. None seems to do what I want, which is to restore my partition table.

I even tried GParted and some Windows alternatives like Partition Guru, Data Recovery HFS+ and like the others I tried on my Mac the closest I got was to recover the files, but I don't have a 3tb HDD to backup everything.

Anyway, what I want is to recover my HDD's partition table like it was before all of this, any suggestion?
And why is it so hard to do that on HFS+? Some 10 years back I had a similar accident with my Windows desktop (NTFS) and I could undo it in a matter of hours including the time I spent looking for answers on the web...

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cgrenier
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Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 15:08
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Re: Help! External HDD partiton recovery HFS+

#3 Post by cgrenier »

What are the results with TestDisk ? Because you have HFS+, use latest 6.14-WIP.
Follow http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step The partition table type was probably EFI GPT.

jellyyo
Posts: 1
Joined: 24 Sep 2015, 12:09

Re: Help! External HDD partiton recovery HFS+

#4 Post by jellyyo »

Any luck you guys? I'm having the exact same issue right now! I can get back tons of files but not my file structure and I dont have the time nor energy to plow through 1 TB of data . most of which gibeerish.

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cgrenier
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Re: Help! External HDD partiton recovery HFS+

#5 Post by cgrenier »

As you have reformated your partition, the only solution I have for you is to use PhotoRec and sort all the recovered files.

Cyra
Posts: 5
Joined: 24 Dec 2014, 18:53

Re: Help! External HDD partiton recovery HFS+

#6 Post by Cyra »

Sorry for the redunant question, but I just want to be 100% certain before moving on to Photorec.

I am on a Mac. An application I installed reformatted an entire drive as a new HFS/GUID partition. No data has been written to this partition since.

Is there any way I can restore the original partition map, with test disk or some other software (or service)?



I have a deep scan going right now and have so far found one deleted partition that does appear to be one of the three that was originally on that disk (it was an EFI partition, but I had reformatted it to HFS, so that really should be it), but it will take several more days for a scan to be complete.

Is it time to move to Photorec instead of waiting?

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