cgsecurity.org

I spent about 4 hours trying to recover my 5TB GPT disk using Testdisk 7.1.
I had "initialized" it when Disk Management prompted me to after a Windows 10 update - which was possibly a mistake.
Testdisk 7.1 found the partition easily and showed me all my files, awesome. But when I saved it, Windows still showed it as not initialized and "Unallocated".
I tried fixing my backup NTFS boot sector which showed as "bad", and regenerating the main boot sector which showed as different. But trying to list files after doing that crashed Testdisk. Tried again, same results.

Nothing seems to save when using 7.1!

Then I noticed that it was in beta. I downloaded 7.0 and tried again, problem was solved in less than a minute.
Great software, but 7.1 seems buggy.

Can you post the testdisk.log files generated by both versions ?

I see now that 7.1 was simulating write:

interface_write()
1 P MS Data 256 1220934399 1220934144 [5tb drive]
simulate write!

Whereas 7.0 was just writing:

interface_write()
1 P MS Data 256 1220934399 1220934144 [5tb drive]
write!

I don't think I did anything differently, and it wasn't noticeable to me that it was only simulating a write - has something changed with the user interface in that area?

Oh, also here's the crash in 7.1:

Boot sector
Status: OK

Backup boot sector
Status: Bad

Sectors are not identical.

A valid NTFS Boot sector must be present in order to access
any data; even if the partition is not bootable.
$MFTMirr location mismatch or first 4 records are fragmented. Run chkdsk.
Failed to load $MFTMirr: Input/output error.
Failed to startup volume: Input/output error.
$MFTMirr location mismatch or first 4 records are fragmented. Run chkdsk.
Failed to load $MFTMirr: Input/output error.
1 [main] testdisk_win 7336 cygwin_exception::open_stackdumpfile: Dumping stack trace to testdisk_win.exe.stackdump

testdisk_win.exe.stackdump:
Exception: STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION at eip=0043DD48
eax=00000001 ebx=006DB6DC ecx=006DB0C4 edx=00000000 esi=0049A4CD edi=006DB3AC
ebp=006DB4DC esp=006DB300 program=C:\Users\me\Downloads\testdisk-7.1-WIP.win\testdisk-7.1-WIP\testdisk_win.exe, pid 9292, thread main
cs=0023 ds=002B es=002B fs=0053 gs=002B ss=002B
Stack trace:
Frame Function Args
006DB4DC 0043DD48 (00202020, 00000110, 00000000, 0000F800)
End of stack trace