TestDisk appears to do everything right, and does nothing

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Author
binba
Posts: 2
Joined: 30 Nov 2015, 01:14

TestDisk appears to do everything right, and does nothing

#1 Post by binba »

I've had a Vantec dual-bay USB enclosure for 1.5 years, running in BIG/spanned mode. 1 HFS+ partition w/a GPT table.

A few days ago the partition vanished. I get a message to initialize the drive, and Disk Utility sees the 3.5TB disk properly but no partitions or volumes on it. The RAID manager for the enclosure has no warnings or errors, and from what I can tell the SMART data looks good too.

Tested on a Macbook Pro 2010 and 2012 with OS X 10.8.4 and 10.10.5. Same behavior.

TestDisk saw a partition that looked just right, I committed the updated table... and nothing ever changed, after multiple attempts and rebooting both the computer and power-cycling the storage. The analysis is always the same.

So I don't even understand if TestDisk is working properly (and what, for that matter, is the purpose of rebooting the machine). Can anyone shed light on this?

Log:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BySStt ... sp=sharing

User avatar
Fiona
Posts: 2835
Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 17:19
Location: Ludwigsburg/Stuttgart - Germany

Re: TestDisk appears to do everything right, and does nothin

#2 Post by Fiona »

Did you run TestDisk within a terminal as superuser?

Fiona

binba
Posts: 2
Joined: 30 Nov 2015, 01:14

Re: TestDisk appears to do everything right, and does nothin

#3 Post by binba »

Well, it turned to be user stupidity (the user=me). I didn't RTFM and missed the step where the missing partition was listed - as "deleted" - and didn't change its status to an active one like "Primary" before committing. As soon as did that, there was no need to reboot anything - the partition came up and the OS immediately saw the drive, all data in tact.
In short - TestDisk saved my day. Thanks!!

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