Accidentically formatted external HDD on MAC Topic is solved

[kbbrain]

Greetings,

a friend of mine asked for help when unintentionally formatting an HDD on a MAC. It is an INTENSO 3 TB and she used the disk to transfer data from the MAC to some (music) devices only capable of reading Windows-FS. I don't know what the original FS was (FAT or NTFS) and my friend doesn't know as well.

When checking the partition table with parted I see following result:

Code: Select all

Error: The partition's data region doesn't occupy the entire partition.
Ignore/Cancel? i                                                          
Model: Intenso USB 3.0 Device (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 3001GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 4096B/4096B
Partition Table: mac
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start  End     Size    File system  Name   Flags
 1      4096B  262kB   258kB                Apple
 2      262kB  3001GB  3001GB  fat32

Is it possible to recover the complete Windows partition at all? I assume the relevant data was overwritten by the MAC tool and hence the FAT-FS cannot be recovered, right?

I tried to recover the partition with testdisk using different configurations (EFI, Intel, Mac), but to no avail . The only files that can be recovered are files created by Mac (directory .Spotlight-V100).

Thank you,
Klaus

PS: I do have logs of the various testdisk runs which I can post on demand. I want to keep at least this first posting clear and not overloaded

[cgrenier]

You can try PhotoRec to recover the lost data.
There is chapter about renaming files recovered by PhotoRec in https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf , it may help you to rename its mp3 to more friendly names.

[kbbrain]

You can try PhotoRec to recover the lost data.
There is chapter about renaming files recovered by PhotoRec in https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf , it may help you to rename its mp3 to more friendly names.

Thanks, that saved some work on my side.

PhotoRec was able to recover tons of files.
Klaus