Recovering deleted HFS+ partition on Windows

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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cptasparagus
Posts: 1
Joined: 29 May 2018, 20:16

Recovering deleted HFS+ partition on Windows

#1 Post by cptasparagus »

I was working on reformatting a drive for a coworker but just after I had started, they told me they hadn't taken anything off of it yet and didn't know they'd lose their data. The drive is an external HDD with HFS+, and I was reformatting it on a pc. I managed to abort the process almost immediately, and there seems to be no data lost (scanned it with a freeware program), but the partition is gone.

A friend who works for apple support directed me to TestDisk as a free soultion to recover, so i'm trying it out, but I have a question about the user interface and he isn't available. I scanned the drive and it says there are two partitions (which I knew) one is DOS_FAT_32, and the other is HFS. TestDisk says that they are both P by default, but I was expecting the FAT partition to have a P and the HFS partition to have a D, for deleted. Assuming that this is just a small error or i'm not understanding the output of the scan correctly, I still just want to recover the partition without deleting any of the data that was contained within it, so the data can be accessed again. To do this, do I set both partitions to P and then just continue through the prompts? or will that create a new partition and overwrite the old data?

Thanks.

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cgrenier
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Re: Recovering deleted HFS+ partition on Windows

#2 Post by cgrenier »

Use 'p' to list the content of the FAT32 partition, it may be a rescue or an utility partition without the lost files of your coworker.
If you have been able to list the lost files using another utility, it may be safer to use this utility (even if commercial) than trying to use testdisk.
Check at least that the file list matches between the 2 utilities.

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