Very interesting history!baumgrenze wrote: ↑29 Mar 2019, 00:35 Thank you for your reply. In it you say:
"you are in the wrong forum.
You selected a German user name."
Things are not always what they seem. German is my second language; American English is primary. My father came from Schwabenland, arriving in early September 1929. Mom's family arrived from Europe between 1830 and 1865. Their roots were as Swiss Anabaptists (Mennonite/Amish) so even she and her family spoke only 'German' at home until she started school. Since I was born in 1940 at the start of WWII, I could not learn German as a small child. It was used by the adults as a 'code language' when they did not want us to understand. For many years when I was still young and spry I spent free time in the High Sierra Nevada of California, often above timberline, hence the sobriquet of 'Baumgrenze' and a sketch of Mt. Brewer (I made beer in the 1980's) as an avatar.
What I wanted to say is that even a supposed German native speaker can easily find the right forum to put his question into.
I was not precise. You wrote 2GB. So this is not about a USB-stick but about a harddrive.
In your reply you say:
"Your log file is a protocol of a scan of your disk environment. Your "F:"-partition is broken.
By the way, there is no 2TB installed in your system. You pretended that in your inital posting."
I would say no but I am rather technically oriented and can't speak for others.
When I ran PhotoRec I did manage to recover 35,190 files, a major victory. In another post, Christophe suggested also running TestDisk to see if I could recover the files with their names and dates. That would be a great help in sorting through the
What you say suggests that I should try partition recovery using TestDisk. It that a difficult process?
That could involve overwriting data that might be helpful for a recovery specialist.What are the data loss risks involved?
Photorec might show false positives hits. Repairing the partition table involves write operations. When repairing a MBR-style partitioning scheme based on false positives write operations could be executed within an existing partition. Although the nested MBR-style partitioning scheme only involves approx. one sector for each partition that is something to avoid.
The general recipe on data loss is to make a copy of the drive in question to ensure physical readability of each sector.
If the drive in question makes strange noises stop the drive and pay 4-digit bucks for a professional service.
Next step is to copy the copy. The second copy is your fear-free playing field for recovery and repair attempts.
Yes, of course. You would then run a file-based comparison on the source and the place where you restored your data from your backup archive. An alternative to file-based comparison is to compare checksum data but which has to be calculated out of file data anyway.I bought a copy of Macrium Reflect at the suggestion of users on sevenforums.com but I've never been confident that I actually created a reliable image file. If I want to image a whole 2TB disk so that I capture the 'lost information' that PhotoRec shows is there, I'd need yet another new 2TB drive to restore it to so I could see if it was the same as the one I've been working on, wouldn't I?
For quick information looking at SMART parameters is essential. The lack of bad SMART information does not necessarily mean that the drive is physically good.Regarding drive sizes, the linked image shows
https://imgur.com/a/LcIOPXq
why I said 2 TB drives. It also suggests that at least this partition creation tool (Mini Tool Partition Wizard) thinks the drive is fine. The most comprehensive hard drive checker I know, HWiNFO64, also shows no problems.
Everything else like third party software, even an extensive SMART check is simply snake oil.
The only verification is reading out every sector with a tool like ddrescue that maintains a log file.
If you read out every sector anyway for control purposes you can create a copy simultaneously without consuming additional "recovery time".