cgsecurity.org

hello,

i'm trying to recover a 80gb fat32 partition, the case is "The disk in drive X is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?)". since both boot sectors were unreadable i chose 'rebuild bs', and after ca. 2 months (!) the operation finished. i was able to see some files, so i chose 'write'.

however, testdisk showed many informations about bad boot sectors after that (sorry - a log is unavailable, since testdisk overwrites its logs), and now it seems that the partition is in the same state - boot sectors recognized as unreadable. what am i to do?

brg
antoni

Either your files system is damaged or you have bad sectors.
Please check your disk using crystaldiskinfo;
http://crystalmark.info/software/Crysta ... dex-e.html
In your case, it's suggested to copy data first, using testdisk.
If your disk is not physically damaged, you can use chkdsk /r to have a try to repair your file system.
Please note, chskdsk is a utility to have a try to repair a file system, but it's not intended for datarecovery purposes.
If your disk is physically damaged, you should consider to clone it first.
Might be possible if datarecovery software reads bad sectors, that datarecovery software becomes unstable or hang.

Fiona

thanks a lot.
i'm pretty convinced it's physically damaged. still it would be good to rescue as much as possible.
here's the crystaldiskinfo report: http://picpaste.com/Przechwytywanie_w_t ... Tmoahx.jpg
copying data using testdisk seems impossible - testdisk doesn't seem to allow to use advanced/undelete function, keeps turning back the cursor to 'boot' option.
i'm attempting now to use clonezilla to clone the partition - although it has severe problems accessing the partition, after repeated trials it allows to chose it as a source.

no. it doesn't seem to be cloneable. after lots of errors clonezilla is either stuck (no action) or returns to start, without any written data. (i will ask on clonezilla forum, too.)

Did you try dd?
It shouild have a command to skip bad sectors.
Also some infos here;
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk
TestDisk Undelete is an option to undelete recently deleted files.
It's not intended for damaged file systems.
An asy solution could be to use TestDisk / Advanced / Image Creation.
So you'd be able to create an image from your affected disk to another healthy disk, partition.
You can mount that image using TestDisk and have a try to list your data and copy/backup them.
But it has not an option to copy an image back to a disk.
So it's only intended to diagnose it and if you're able to list your data, to copy/backup them.
Also PhotoRec is able to handle this image.
But PhotoRec doesn't restore files keeping their names and directories.

Fiona