lost partitions - how to save listed files with long names
Posted: 22 Feb 2012, 12:26
I have used an eSata 1,5TB HD (NTFS formatted with two primary partitions) with a Digitus eSata to USB Adapter when I have got an Blue Screen in Vista. After reboot the external drive was not correctly recognized via USB in the tasktray since it was missing the drive letter and was only seen as an USB Storage Device. In the Device Manager the Harddisk was recognized correctly as a Seagate with the appropriate model number, while in the Windows Disk Management snap-in it was shown uninitialised. Every test in Vista with testdisk-win with the harddisk connected as an external USB via the Digitus eSATA to USB Adapter or as an external IDE via the Digitus eSATA to USB in connection with an eSata to IDE connector which I had laying around, or the hardisk connected directly via an external eSATA Drive Bay when built in an external eSATA drive did not find any of the lost partitions. I tried also to boot with the eSATA as a second internal drive but the Bios couldn't initialize the damaged drive at all and the boot process stopped. Therefore I tried testdisk under Linux with the gparted boot cd, but even here the partitions weren't found with the search function after it was asked to search for NTFS partitions. I made the same tests with my Thinkpad Notebook under WinXP with the same results. Then I remembered that I had an old Promise SATA TX2 adapter which I built in an old Pentium 4 PC which I still had. The damaged Hardisk I connected as an internal second HD with the Promise adapter and I booted from a Hirens Boot CD, luckily the Bios of the Promise recognized the Hardisk correctly and I could start testdisk dos which recognized the hardisk now via the BIOS with INT 81 correctly, even both partitions were found, which couldn't be found with all the tests before when it was done via the drivers in win or linux. Now I can list all the files in testdisk but I have the problem how to save the 1,5TB with copying in testdisk, because the old PC has only a USB 2.0 addon card build in, every test to install USB Storage drivers with the universal bootdisk USB storage drivers ended with a division overflow error when the needed ti1000dd.sys driver is installed! Therefore I connected the external usb drive (Fat32 formatted) which I wanted to use as the recovery drive to my Vista PC and shared it, so I can use the universal bootdisk TCP/IP dos service to map this drive with the net use command from the Pentium 4 PC. When I change on the network share before I start testdisk I can copy to the recovery drive but only with short filenames, all my long ntfs filenames got truncated! Even a test with the recovery drive formatted as NTFS and then in the universal bootdisk TCP/IP services with the NTFS feature enabled ended in truncated filenames when copying the correctly listed long filenames from testdisk to the recovery drive! Therefore I need to know how I can save the correctly listed long filenames within testdisk dos by copying them with the testdisk copy feature to my recovery drive via TCP/IP network share. I knew I can also write the found partition information back on harddisk to get the chance that Vista will recognize the harddrive in the correct way, but the damaged drive is my backup drive containing all the important files so I will be on the safer side when I can backup my files before testing this with copying them to my recovery drive, especially as testdisk found everything which I tested when I changed through the directories and all the files were there down to the 'deepest' directories. I would really appreciate any help regarding the problem of saving the files with long filenames. Thx in advance.