cgsecurity.org

hello

i accidentally formatted an external drive that was originally hfs to extfat format. testdisk identifies the drive as an intel partition table. to recover my original partition would i scan as intel or hfs?


thanks

It's for me difficult to judge, because most disks are delivered using Intel-MBR
Intel-Mac uses EFI GPT as partition table type.
There are some things to watch.
Exfat partitions using NTFS as partition type and only the boot sector and file system will be exfat.
If you mark an exfat partition in testdisk, in the last line at the bottom of your display, you'll find some info about your boot sector.
TestDisk will be only able to write an exfat partition to your partition table.
TestDisk doesn't support exfat boot sector recovery.

Fiona

thanks for your response.
I actually figured it out last night. test disk identified the drive currently as intel. the scan only produced the exfat partition I accidentally made. deeper scan only produced bogus partitions.
I scanned as mac and test disk found an hfs partition but was unable to perform any actions. I noted the beginning
sector and total partition size.
using pdisk I "created" a partition with identical attributes. os x identified the partition but indicated it was not initialized.
reopening test disk the drive was correctly identified as mac hfs+. the scan produced the partition I earlier found.
this time I was able to repair and write.
after a reboot all is well.