cgsecurity.org

We have a formatted footage 3tb hard drive that has evidentiary footage on it that I urgently need to recover.
It was disconnected immediately after format and has not been written to again. I ran photorec but dont know how to recover the partition in its entirety. Over the weekend I left if recovering mpg files but they are not correct. There are hundreds of small mpg files per directory which are not playable.

I would prefer to 'unformat' the drive as it was instead of this file recovery.

How should I proceed?

Do you know the previous file system of your DVR drive?
What file system did you format?

Fiona

Hi

Unfortunately I havent been able to identify the format type, I have contacted hikvision directly but have not yet received and replies.

I currently have it running on an the intel scan so I will see what it says.

Intel MBR supports disks up to 2.2 TB.
Partitions bigger than 2.2 TB should be GPT (EFI-GPT).
That's why you shouldn't write any Intel/PC partition table.
Did testdisk already find your previous partition?

Fiona

Hi again

It seems as though we had a power failure while the drive was busy, it has found an 800gb partition but I dont think that is correct. I think that maybe there isnt much chance of recovery now.

I emailed hikvision and they said they can help, but short of an actual app that can do what I need I dont think it will help.

I tried the other option for efi but it did t find anything at all.

I need a write blocker for next time I think