What is the Best Option

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
Forum rules
When asking for technical support:
- Search for posts on the same topic before posting a new question.
- Give clear, specific information in the title of your post.
- Include as many details as you can, MOST POSTS WILL GET ONLY ONE OR TWO ANSWERS.
- Post a follow up with a "Thank you" or "This worked!"
- When you learn something, use that knowledge to HELP ANOTHER USER LATER.
Before posting, please read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
Locked
Message
Author
nbalchin
Posts: 1
Joined: 12 Aug 2016, 16:19

What is the Best Option

#1 Post by nbalchin »

I have a 1.8TB Disk that was previously formatted EXT3 with a very complex folder structure and 1.4 TB of critical files.

The disk was plugged into a windows server and assigned as a backup disk, which means that a new NTFS partion table was written

no data was ever written to the new partition scheme

my question is this, can I recover the previous partition scheme with TestDisk to access the files, or should I just skip to trying to recover the files with Photorec, and abandon my Folder structure (which has significant importance

User avatar
cgrenier
Site Admin
Posts: 5432
Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 15:08
Location: Le Perreux Sur Marne, France
Contact:

Re: What is the Best Option

#2 Post by cgrenier »

It should be possible to recover the ext3 partition using testdisk, Analyse, Quick Search, Stop, Deeper Search. When the partition is found, you can choose Stop.
Set this Linux partition as P(rimary). On next screen, choose Write, confirm. In Advanced, select the partition and choose Superblock.
After a reboot, use fsck.ext3 with the values displayed when in "Superblock" to try to fix the filesystem.
Good luck

Locked