cgsecurity.org

Have managed to run TestDisk off a WinPE Usb drive - analyses the SSD drive and says the "Partition sector doesn't have the endmark 0xAA55"

Quick search finds no partition and "L" loading one from backup says "No backup found!"

Adding a partition wants to have CHS 0 0 1 through to 15565 254 63 and selected 07 (HPFS/NTFS) as partition type.

Then ran a deeper search - no partition found.

Changed partition type to 0b (Fat32) - none found. Then tried 0c (Fat32 LBA) - none found....

Have I done something wrong or has the disk been entirely scrubbed (lost any formatting)?

AJNiteowl wrote: ↑09 Jul 2019, 15:04 Adding a partition wants to have CHS 0 0 1 through to 15565 254 63 and selected 07 (HPFS/NTFS) as partition type.

Then ran a deeper search - no partition found.

If you add a partition that spans the whole drive I really don't know if deeper search will search within.
How long did "deeper search" take?
It is better to search before making any modifications to the SSD drive I guess.

Unfortuntely you do not state what structure you expect to be on the SSD drive and what happened that you don't see this structure anymore. You don't show a log either.
Maybe we have a clairvoyant in the forum who can give additional hints.

Have I done something wrong or has the disk been entirely scrubbed (lost any formatting)?

How should one know?!

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Thanks for your illuminating reply... It turns out that this is more of a common problem than I thought as I later found out when I managed to find similar problems identified from the error code (0xAA55). Fiona (from CGSecurity) has dealt with this issue before and suggested running PhotoRec to see if any data remained on the disk - it ran in 2 passes and found nothing so there is an answer.

In looking at this today, I have realised that this is a 128GB SSD drive and yet 15565 x 254 x 63 = 249GB? Even if it has the wrong geometry I expect that if PhotoRec doesn't find any data then there is none there. It is concerning that an (electrical) SSD card can completely erase all data like this, whereas a disk platter drive at least leaves data on this disk which can be scraped off later (even if re-formatted and written over etc).

I can't think of anything else to do with this other than putting it into an M.2 NGFF USB 3 caddy and running some other utilities on it (which will probably give me the same answer anyway) - but the SSD drive appears to be unreliable at best...

Any other thoughts?

AJNiteowl wrote: ↑09 Jul 2019, 22:12 Thanks for your illuminating reply... It turns out that this is more of a common problem than I thought as I later found out when I managed to find similar problems identified from the error code (0xAA55).

No, AA55 is a not an error code. It is a fingerprint at the end of a bootsector.

In looking at this today, I have realised that this is a 128GB SSD drive and yet 15565 x 254 x 63 = 249GB? Even if it has the wrong geometry I expect that if PhotoRec doesn't find any data then there is none there.

15565 x 254 x 63 = 249GB?
No, this is a wrong calculation. Your product is the number of sectors available. To arrive at disc capacity you would need to multiply that product figure by the sector size.