cgsecurity.org

Hi,

I'm trying to restore a partition that was somehow deleted on a USB 3.0 external hard drive. It was working perfectly the last time I plugged it into my Windows 10 laptop.

After choosing analyze -> quick search, it didn't update the screen, showing the progress of the search like it should, and pressing any other keys doesn't result in any response.

Is this expected behaviour, or how can I get quick search to work?

Can you try to clone the disk to an empty disk using ddrescue as described in https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf ?
Once it's done, remove the original disk and try TestDisk on the clone.
If ddrescue failed to clone the disk, there is a hardware problem with the disk, in this case, you should contact a data recovery company.

Thanks for the suggestion, will try that once I get a drive that is big enough.

I left it to run, and the screen changed, now its stuck here. I suspect there're hardware problems that prevent it from reading the start of the drive.

Disk /dev/sdb - 4000 GB / 3725 GiB - CHS 486397 255 63
Analyse cylinder     2/486396: 00%
Read error at 0/25/49 (lba=1623)

  Stop

Leaving it on to see if its able to skip past this bad sector to make any more progress.