So I've had some partial progress, but still a failure. I successfully cloned my drive which took 10 hours.
But then this is where I may have messed up as i was on the phone talking to my linux knowledgable cousin.
In windows, the drive showed up as raw automatically assigned the letter f:
I went into Testdisk > advanced > chose the partition with the correct start and end numbers of 264192 5860532223, and this is where memory gets a little muddy, I might have tried to list files and got the "can't open file system, file system seems damaged" warning. at this point I think I chose "write" then got the BS as bad, and Backup BS as good, but because I didn't go back and read the instructions chose "rebuild BS" instead of "backup BS" which might have been my second screwup after chosing the advanced path rather than the "quick search > stop>" process.
after this when listing the partition, 3 showed up instead of two. Presumable two BS's and the other was again my ms data partition of 5.8gb (not corresponding to the data I originally had on the drive) on which I could not read the files.
Sooo, I quit Testdisk (by the way, I've not yet been able to locate the logfile which I did chose to create this time), rebooted (as TD had said I'd have to for the rebuilt BS to take effect). CHKDSK attempted to start, I stopped it, got into windows and the drive showed at D: (but was unlabelled) and I got the following error in attempting to access it:
D:\ is not accessible.
The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.
Sooo, at this point I figured I'd screwed up in testdisk by being on the phone, so decided before I format and re-clone to start over that I'd reboot and let CHKDSK run it's course. It started deleting a tonne of "orphan file record segments" from about #5000 to 119000, then started repairing or retrieving or rebuilding some stuff (was going super fast), I started seeing a bunch of my photo files being listed, .NEF's, Tiff's, jpeg's not a tonne, but at least 100 or so. Then in the end it rebuilt the MFT and finished.
Upon entering windows, it now carried the label I'd originally assigned to the original messed up drive of " DATA (D:) " which was a great sign, however upon trying to open it, I got:
D:\ is not accessible.
Access is denied.
A little different then before CHKDSK. Under properties, it has a size of 0bytes by the way. 0 bytes used, 0bytes unused.
So I guess l'm going back to re cloning and then trying to follow either the correct steps in Testdisk or letting it do another full quick search and deeper search.
Unless cgrenier, you have any ideas that might save me some time.
PS oh I went back into testdisk after doing the CHKDSK and doing QUICK SEARCH > STOP > PRIMARY > LIST FILES at this point when listing the files, 7 show up, all but one apparently empty.
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