Help! Computer noob doing everything wrong.

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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aphelinologist
Posts: 2
Joined: 03 Mar 2019, 03:01

Help! Computer noob doing everything wrong.

#1 Post by aphelinologist »

Hello and thank you for your help.

I recently had a hard drive crash with a bunch of my lab's data. It contained countless images that are important to many ongoing investigations. We have avoided saving anything else to the drive in hopes that Photo rec will be able to recover some material. I downloaded the mac compatible version of the software, but am relatively new to command line computing. The program has used the sudo command to reach the node, and I have disabled the System integrity protection that was keeping photorec from recognizing my computers internal hard drive.

However when I initialize the program, it by typing ./Users/kresslein/Downloads/testdisk-7.0/photorec into the command line, the program just waits. I know that programs that are running do this until they have completed, but it seems from all of the online tutorials that I have looked at that a menu with hard drive options is suppose to come up. Is this correct, or have I done something wrong?

Thanks for helping a newbie
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cgrenier
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Re: Help! Computer noob doing everything wrong.

#2 Post by cgrenier »

Try "./Users/kresslein/Downloads/testdisk-7.0/photorec /dev/rdisk0" (replace rdisk0 by the correct drive letter).
Does it work better ?

aphelinologist
Posts: 2
Joined: 03 Mar 2019, 03:01

Re: Help! Computer noob doing everything wrong.

#3 Post by aphelinologist »

The program is still stalling prior to initialization. I have successfully run photorec on an old PC flawlessly, but it seems to get really hung up on the Mac version.

When I initially downloaded the program, it opened into a menu but said that it couldn't find any disk from which to scan. After searching I found this post from user alafortanfuni

I found the solution. Issue is related to version high sierra (v 10.13). Now I can see the internal harddisk. Tried to rescue some files and it worked.
I copy-paste the solution here, in case someone may have been suffering the same problem.

Note: Recover Lost Mac Data under Mac OS X 10.13 (High Sierra)
Due to macOS High Sierra (macOS 10.13) requirement, Mac users are not allowed an access to the built-in system drive from any apps. Therefore, if you need to restore lost data from the system disk under macOS 10.13, please "disable System Integrity Protection" first.

How to disable "disable System Integrity Protection"? Please follow the steps below.

Step 1: Reboot the Mac and hold down"Command + R" keys simultaneously after you hear the startup chime, this will boot OS X into Recovery Mode.

Step 2: When the "OS X Utilities" screen appears, pull down the "Utilities" menu at the top of the screen instead, and choose "Terminal".

Step 3: In the "Terminal" window, type in "csrutil disable" and press "Enter" then restrart your Mac.


I followed the directions, and now the program will not start. I went back and enabled csrutil and the problem did not go away.

Hope this helps

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