cgsecurity.org

A friend of mine told me his "D" partition shows up as "RAW" in Windows after his attempt to reinstall it. Here is what it looks like:



So I stumbled upon TestDisk which seems to have the fix for that. The problem is that when I try to RebuildBS, nothing whatsover happens once the 40 min scan for MFT is finished. I get no error messages or anything. It goes "Search mft 456______/457156608", then it gets me back to the previous screen:



Is this a bug? If not, why is it (not) working like this?

Can you post the content of testdisk.log file ?

Sure.

Can't attach it. Pastebin: http://pastebin.com/DSVmckVV

Ok, the boot sector was never written in the first place and the zero-filled hole is just a placeholder created at some point during Windows installation. I've managed to get the partition back by first removing all partitions in Disk management and then performing [Analyze] in TestDisk and setting all four entries to Physical. The partition contained an incomplete Windows setup that was aborted at the file copying step. So I called my friend and he confirmed that indeed there were three attempts to install the OS. I guess he wanted to at least get me trying by not telling the full story first -_-

Still, my suggestion is to make TestDisk a little more clear about MFT search results.