MBR Code or Boot Sector?

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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RodLockwood
Posts: 8
Joined: 07 Apr 2018, 08:56

MBR Code or Boot Sector?

#1 Post by RodLockwood »

I am currently waiting for Photo Rec to finish copying the files from my 2 TB (ext4) backup drive to my new 2 TB drive. This does not look like it will end well as the original names and folder structure is gone. At least there are file extensions, but it has been running for almost 2 hours 30 minutes and has recovered almost 30,000 files with an ETA of 45 hours. Then spending all the time to rename the files to there original names, then figuring out where they go to.

At one time I had the two folders that were good and all I needed to do was copy them once I was able to buy new drives large enough to hold the folders. Now something else went wrong and nothing is showing. It has occurred to me though, that maybe the MBR was damaged and I could restore that so everything would return to the way it was previously so that I could simply undelete the other folders I need to one of the new drives, and then move the two folders that were good to the other new drive.

I have not tried this as I don’t know if “write TestDisk MBR Code to first sector” will actually restore the MBR, or create a new one that will jumble the files. There is the option to restore the boot sector that I don’t understand what it is referring to. The drive was never bootable, so is this option only good for bootable drives, or does boot sector mean something else?

Otherwise, I am thinking that I should just cut my losses and, if possible, use the recovered text files that I made listing everything in my Archives folder (40 years of saved DOS and Windows install files, and archives of collections of games, images, music, fonts, documents, and applications), and just try to relocate the unique files and re-download them. Also to do the same with the movies and videos I downloaded recently that were in the good folders, that took me two or three months to download. I have already been working on restoring the backed up files for three months now.

It should be easier recovering the games archived, and files of my various creative projects on my other drive, since it is NTFS, and most of the files I created were either open documents/spreadsheets, images, or plain text files.

RodLockwood
Posts: 8
Joined: 07 Apr 2018, 08:56

Re: MBR Code or Boot Sector?

#2 Post by RodLockwood »

Update: There has barely been any change in the number of files, but now the estimated time to completion is 65 hours. This, after running just TestDisk for almost 9 hours.

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