Analyse Sees Expected Partition but Quick Search Finds Weird Partitions?

[complexification]

Hello,

Any help is greatly appreciated. I have spent many hours reading trying to figure this out, but not being a hardware guy means there is too much I don't know, to make sense of a lot of what I read.

My goal is to be able to recover files from the disk... if the disk can be fixed and made bootable again great, but file recovery is the main goal.

It seems strange to me that Analyse and Advanced>Filesystem Utils shows the expected partition "HD Macintosh" (within a second), but Search (taking hours) shows a bunch of partitions, none of which seem to match the "HD Macintosh" partition.

Background:

• Computer would not boot one morning - "forbidden symbol" meaning iMAC can't find the OS files.

• Problem disk is in an iMAC, self installed, Intel 520 series (480Gig) SSD - it was the only HD in the machine. Nothing fancy like dual boots or anything.

• I believe it was one big bootable partition for the whole drive (99% sure, but not 100% because drive was originally partitioned 5.5 years ago). Not sure of the partition type now... but likely, Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

• The root cause of the failure may have been a power failure when the iMAC was running.

• TRIM was/is not enabled on the SSD

Currently:

• TestDisk shows the partition table as EFI GPT.

• Analyse and Advanced>Filesystem Utils shows the expected large "HD Macintosh" partition, but of type unknown.

• So I hoped that Quick Search would show "HD Macintosh", but Quick Search finds a bunch of partitions, none of which make sense to me, and none of which seem to match the "HD Macintosh" partition.

• And late last night - very tired - I may have screwed up. I clicked the "Initialize" option in a pop-up (instead of "Ignore") which may have written partition information to the disk.

• So, I am coming to the forum here before I make any more mistakes.

Is this a partition table problem, and that if the partition table(s) are corrected, my files should be accessible?

Is there a way to know for sure what partition type "HD Macintosh" was before the disk corruption so that I can be 100% sure of what type to pick in TestDisk?

Lastly, how should I proceed from here?

I would attached log files, if I could, but keep getting error invalid file extension.

If you need other information just ask. Thanks.

[cgrenier]

As you have initialized the disk, try photorec to recover your data. Unfortunately it will not recover the original filenames.
If it only recovers fragment of files, enable the Expert mode in Options, start a recovery, use a blocksize of 512 bytes, use the default options otherwise.