Extern HDD empty in Finder and TestDisk but full in Stellar Phoenix and unable to repair with TestDisk

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Spoon2017
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Joined: 08 Oct 2017, 12:07
Location: Fontenay-sous-bois

Extern HDD empty in Finder and TestDisk but full in Stellar Phoenix and unable to repair with TestDisk

#1 Post by Spoon2017 »

What can I do now: what is the next possible step ?

Long story resumed: I improved the situation, yet I am stuck now
  • A girlfriend's faulty 1Tb External usb HDD with NTFS partition took about 10 minutes to mount on my Mac X.12.6 and then appeared empty in the Finder
  • The Mac Disk Utility could detect after a long time 540Gb and 607 files in the faulty HDD
  • The third party commercial Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery software could easily show the full tree structure and files of the faulty HDD. But no recovery without a licence
  • I successfully used DDRescue_GUI to dump the content of the faulty 1Tb HDD onto a healthy 1Tb
  • The healthy HDD mounts immediately, but still appears empty in the Finder and with 540Gb and 607 files in the Disk Utility
  • Stellar shows the exact same full tree structure and files on the healthy HDD. But, I still wan't to find a really free solution to recover all the data (or as much as possible)
  • Sudo TestDisk only lists "." and ".."; It proposes a corrected rebuild sector but can't write it. it "can't write new MBR code", "can't write new NTFS boot sector" (and NTFS boot backup sector). And it indicates: "MFT and MFT mirror are bad. Failed to repair them"
Any help much appreciated.
PS: I am only slightly computer literate, and amazingly there is a lot of probably basic computer vocabulary and concepts that I don't understand.
Here is a couple of them:
  • the MSDos checkdisk /F : if used, does it erase the existing MFT ?
  • The tree structure and file names: is it not stored in the MFT ?
  • A read only HDD: how to make the HDD writable again ?

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Re: Extern HDD empty in Finder and TestDisk but full in Stellar Phoenix and unable to repair with TestDisk

#2 Post by cgrenier »

Your partition is mounted by Mac OS X, you should umount it if you want that Mac OS X lets you modify this disk.
The MFT contains filenames from NTFS filesystems.
WIndows chkdsk should repair the filesystem, try it on the healthy 1Tb.
If it doesn't work, it may be a good idea to acquire the commercial product.

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