External drive reformatted as Recovery, missing partition

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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torrmundi
Posts: 1
Joined: 27 Feb 2017, 01:22

External drive reformatted as Recovery, missing partition

#1 Post by torrmundi »

During a Windows 10 PC's drive recovery process, I managed to convert the attached (USB) My Smartbook (2TB) into a recovery drive. I'm now in the process of trying to recover the old partitions and the files that were blown away on the My Book.

TestDisk, v7.0 has discovered (at 83% of the search so far):

Code: Select all

  FAT32 LBA                0  32 33  4177 117 36   67108864 [ESD-USB]
  Linux                21166 190 17 22145 173 44   15726592
  Linux                74474  71 30 75453  54 57   15726592
 
I've used the My Book drive in two ways:
- with WD Smartware to backup (this is now older backup content).
- copying files directly from my PC's drive a folder in the My Book's root (my latest data).
I'm interested primarily in recovering my latest copied files, not the backups.

But here are my questions:
1. What are the Linux partitions that TestDisk is finding?
2. Looks like the Windows partition is blown away by the recovery partition (32 GB). Should I go directly to file recovery and forget the partition?

Thanks!
/John

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cgrenier
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Re: External drive reformatted as Recovery, missing partition

#2 Post by cgrenier »

Use 'p' to list the files from each partition.
Try "Deeper Search" after Analyse and Quick Search. It should be able to find your lost partition, next choose BackupBS, confirm, Quit and restart your computer. You may have to use chkdsk (See https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf ) and photorec to recover the files.

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