cgsecurity.org

I'm trying to help a friend recover his HP SimpleSave 1TB USB 2.0 External. He accidentally started a quick format on the drive and then tried to cancel it before the format finished. Also, he might have unplugged the drive during this format. Since the format didn't finish, he couldn't access it in windows so he ended up doing another quick format. I believe the original file system was NTFS, but the HP SimpleSave has a hardware-maintained partition titled "HP Launcher" that includes the simplesave software.

He has tried some recovery programs like Easeus, Ontrack, Stellar Phoenix, but none of those were able to recover anything useful. Photorec worked for recovering most of the 60k+ photos, but with that many photos, losing the names and the folder structure is frustrating. Photorec didn't do as well recovering all the videos.

Would it be possible to use testdisk to recover the partition or undo the format? I have been trying to figure out testdisk but I'm not even sure what method would be best for this situation. Any ideas?

Would it be possible to get some infos from TestDisk Analyse and Quick Search to determine wether a recovery might be possible or not?

Fiona

I think this is what you wanted?

After a deep scan it still showed the same partition information. Pressing P to list files showed the system info and recycle bin but nothing to recover. What else can be done?

It looks like that the file system is overridden.
In case you can try PhotoRec, if you want to keep file names and directories, you can have a look at commercial software.

Fiona

Do you think taking the hard drive out of the external enclosure and connecting it through sata would make any difference?

External harddisk are often encrypted through a key chip in the enclosure.
Most users didn't even notice it.
Examples;
http://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/post ... pted#p1913
http://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/post ... pted#p1783
http://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/post ... pted#p1068
Infortunately it doesn't look that it makes any difference, because it looks like identically overridden.
In your case datarecovery software might help.
I would love to find a partition including your data.
But it looks like that Deeper Search didn't help as much either.
You could try PhotoRec.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Fiona