Urgent, need help in recovering data from external USB drive

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Author
calvin
Posts: 1
Joined: 10 May 2019, 16:04

Urgent, need help in recovering data from external USB drive

#1 Post by calvin »

HI,
I think I corrupted my USB external drive (500GB) by unplugging from the USB of the laptop without shutting down completely. When I tried to open the USB drive in Windows Explorer (Windows 7), it reported "...need to format...". I ran chkdsk f: /f (F: is the drive letter Windows sees as the USB external drive), the result is attached in Chkdsk_run.txt - you can that there are 413184 files on this 500 GB drive. Also, Chkdsk reported:
The first NTFS boot sector is unreadable or corrupt.
Reading second NTFS boot sector instead.
So I used testdisk-7.1, it identified the USB external drive, I did an Analysis and it come back with 2 partitions - 1 FAT name DellUtility, and second NTFS named Recovery. And said Structure is OK. So I did a WRITE.
After reboot, I see 2 drives F: and G: (instead of just a F:), now the F: is the FAT partition and G: is NTFS but unaccessbile.... and I ran chkdsk on G: and it doesn't do much (see Chkdsk_run_afterTestdisk.txt).

Ran Analysis with Deep Search and I saw the partition with data, label OS. Please advise on what to do to recover that (and the duplicate entry for the RECOVERY partition) .... Please see details in the attached Partition_Info file.

Thanks!
Calvin
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ChkdskRunAfterTestDrive.png
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Please review comments here and advise
Please review comments here and advise
ChkdskRunBeforeTestDrive.png (115.67 KiB) Viewed 1222 times

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cgrenier
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Re: Urgent, need help in recovering data from external USB drive

#2 Post by cgrenier »

You can copy your files using TestDisk, Advanced, List, copy...

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