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Can testdisk be used for?

Posted: 24 May 2015, 21:59
by a9ftninja
Im scared that i have only one shot. am willing to pay for help.

I ( lol ) installed steamOS without reading anything. it zapped my hard drives and partitions. when finally reinstalling windows i accidently selected my storage partition on my main HD to format. that storage partition holds everything digital that is dear to me. ALL of our pictures. it also contains the only copy of my windows CD KEY. whole different airheaded story right there.

Can this program bring that content back to me? if yes i can learn to do it properly on my own. if you think it is difficult and youre a reputable member here i can donate to your paypal. there are so many sketchy looking or very expensive software solutions out there that i have no idea what to use or how to do it!

thank you in advance

Re: Can testdisk be used for?

Posted: 26 May 2015, 10:02
by Fiona
Reformatting of a partition will override your boot sector and file system.
You'll need datarecovery software which reads underlying data in your sectors and ignoring your file system.
PhotoRec can recover underlying data.
If you didn't format identically like FAT to NTFS vice versa, partition recovery would be possible.
Info:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Data_Rec ... _partition

Fiona

Re: Can testdisk be used for?

Posted: 27 May 2015, 06:12
by a9ftninja
Thank you for your reply. since posting i read more and became more confident with running testdisk and photorec. with photorec i found(lol) 500k text files. needing one that contains win7 cdkey. been picking through those by hand. about 90% though however when reading the sectors it hangs jumping up and down a few hundred sectors at a time just bouncing back and forth.

ill report back soon if i have any questions. thank you for your response fiona.

Re: Can testdisk be used for?

Posted: 27 May 2015, 12:59
by Fiona
Did you use an editor to write your cd key on a text file?
If you used another file format like *doc, *odt, it would be much easier tio find.

Fiona