Recover ExFAT Partition from Windows Phone 10 (Lumia 950) sd-card 128GB

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Pollux
Posts: 1
Joined: 24 Jul 2018, 10:50

Recover ExFAT Partition from Windows Phone 10 (Lumia 950) sd-card 128GB

#1 Post by Pollux »

Hi all,
the 128 GB sd-card was formatted with exFAT by the Windows Phone. (up to and including 32 GB: FAT32 - above 32 GB: exFAT was used)
[spoiler]
It was working well, I could transfer pictures and images between the phone and the computer (Windows 10).
A few months ago, the Wifi of the Phone broke, a repair offer was requested but was to expensive.
I saved all the important data from the sd-card on the computer (I thought). The sd-card was removed from the phone and stored in a transparent plastic sd-card box.
Now I wanted to document the project and in the folder of the computer I'm missing a few photos. I thought just take the sd-card in the reader and get them. Nope.
[/spoiler]
The sd-card in the reader wasn't recognized by the computer (Windows 10).
I used PhotoRec with the Raspberry Pi (Raspbian) to recover photos and store the on an external HDD. But now I've many photos three of four times. I don't think this is a failure from PhotoRec, I think the Windows Phone saved it such weird, because one is in a smaller resolution (for preview), one is quadratic size (for gallery preview) and one is identical to the source but I forwarded it (sent folder).
I have the needed pictures now, but I'm a little perfectionist and so I wanted to recover the partition.

I started testdisk (on the Raspberry Pi) and it detected partition table 'None' and unknown partition, the search brought the partition exFAT as result and also the deeper Search, but I couldn't write the partition table because 'Write isn't available because the partition table type "None" has been selected.'
The next time it detected 'Intel' partition table and two NTFS partitions.
The logs are in the following posts: Log 1 (exFAT) and Log 2 (NTFS).

I tried this: https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf -> 7.4 Repairing FAT32, exFAT and NTFS boot sector using TestDisk
But I got 'Boot sector: Bad' and 'Backup boot sector: Bad'.
Log is also in the following post:

As I was creating this post, I saw there were many read errors. Is the card broken?
Or is the 'latest' release on Raspbian Jessie (TestDisk 6.14) too old?

Best regards,
Pollux

PS: I couldn't create one post, because the system restricts it.
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Re: Recover ExFAT Partition from Windows Phone 10 (Lumia 950) sd-card 128GB

#2 Post by cgrenier »

After selecting/dev/sdc, PC Intel, you can manually add ('a' key) the partition

Code: Select all

NTFS                    2  10 21 15545 107 62  249704448
.
exFAT and NTFS shares the same id 7.
Set the partition as P(rimary).
On next screen, choose Write, confirm, Quit.

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