cgsecurity.org

I recently screwed up my ext hard drive because my router said it could do USB file sharing (eg as a NAS) but obviously couldn't do it properly without converting my hard drive format to RAW. (If there is a way to convert back without format then that may solve it)

I downloaded TestDisk a few days ago and it was the only program to find my files (hooray). I managed to copy all the very important stuff and even a lot of the larger stuff. But this morning I had a major issue with Windows and was forced to reinstall. Somehow that issue may have affected or been caused by this ext HDD. Because now I can not see my files in TestDisk. I ran PhotoRec for a few minutes and it found some of the files but I'm hoping that I can maybe recover the full file structure still.

On TestDisk, the disks found seem a little different now as I've noted in the image below.



Going back to the bottom one which was working before and doing a scan results in "File structure seems unreadable".

And now, I've just rebooted the app and its gone!! Even worse! It only appears on the bottom one and its giving different errors during scanning: "Read error at 65535/0/1 (lba=65535)" where the 65535 value changes regularly.

Have I well and truly lost this drive? Can anyone recommend anything else to try. TestDisk is the only program I've found that's actually had some success recovering so I'm still hopeful!

Disconnect some disks and check if you have the same problem. The problem may be due to a weak power supply.
There may be bad sectors, did the disk fall (shock ?) ?

cgrenier wrote:Disconnect some disks and check if you have the same problem. The problem may be due to a weak power supply.
There may be bad sectors, did the disk fall (shock ?) ?

I'm not sure it would be down to the power supply, Its a 650W on a system probably half that in average usage and 2 of the drives are externally powered.
And no it was not dropped at all.

And, today just booting up TestDisk I have all 3 4TB options in the media menu, the same as the image. The bottom option still returns the unreadable error.
And, running the scan on the Physical drive one seems to have returned the HDD to having only one available on the menu

* bump *