Totally Lost Too

[PhilLevel]

Hi,

I came here as a recommendation by a user of ExPVR - a utility to transfer Sky TV recordings from an 'old' Skybox HDD to a new one. I have used this software previously, indeed the HDD I am having trouble with was the target drive in that case, but it is now the source drive.

It is a 1TB HDD and is still visible and readable in the Skybox, yet is reported as RAW by Windows. The ExPVR software looks exclusively for a FAT32 format and that is where the recommendation to come here arose. (I also discovered that Windows 10 doesn't like FAT32 either so connected the HDD to my Win2008R2 server where I used Testdisk 7.0 on it.

The drive appears as FAT12, so I ran "Rebuild BS" and after stating "FAT32 ?" it decides that it is, see image below where it is searching subdirectories for the cluster size.


Upon completion it reports that it cannot find the cluster size as shown below.


So, what next? If I choose "Repair FAT" I get a warning that it is "Very dangerous! Expert only" and not being an expert I don't wish to risk something I have no idea about.

I have left the program at the following position because scanning a 1TB drive takes a long time. Any help gratefully received. Thank you.

[cgrenier]

Try PhotoRec, you may be able to recover some of your videos.
Good luck

[PhilLevel]

Christophe,
Thanks for the reply.

Photorec has been running for 24 hours with estimated 10 days to go. So far I have a 4kB mp3 and a handful of jpegs that are all unknown file format, my suspicion is that these jpegs are either relics or contain some form of encryption.

Can you comment on why Repair FAT is "Vert Dangerous! Expert only"? If all else fails then I guess that will be my last resort.

[PhilLevel]

I just logged on to the server and found that the scan finished well short of the 10 days expected.

The below images show Photoreq dos box after completion, the list is the files it found. Not a single video file and nothing much above 50kB.





It seems like there's not much to lose from trying more drastic measures. Any further advice?

[cgrenier]

Can you try using the PhysicalDrive instead of F: ?

[PhilLevel]

Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean.

I avoided using drive letter paths (I think that was in the Teskdisk tutorial?) when choosing the source device from the list.
The destination in this case is a folder on Network Drive P: (a NAS)

[cgrenier]

Sorry, the last screenshot was already correct.
When you run PhotoRec, enable "ts" in FileOpt. Do you recover video this way ?