Accidentally erased HFS+ storage drive using Disk Utility having some issues using testdisk

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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bloooor
Posts: 2
Joined: 16 Mar 2020, 21:51

Accidentally erased HFS+ storage drive using Disk Utility having some issues using testdisk

#1 Post by bloooor »

I have been trying for the past few days now, as i prefer not have a go first at something instead of just nagging other people who have probably learnt themselves also.. but i'm now exhausted and don't want to put my old Mac Pro through another 15+ hours of 'Deeper Search' for it to not be able to write to another hard drive (external) of which i got an 'You will have to reboot for the change to take effect.' and after rebooting both terminal (separately) abd then my mac, nothing seems to change/work so maybe i'm missing something?..

Since then i tried the Advanced tab and started copying an image.dd but after many hours and reading it might not recover everything with file structure, just the 'blocks' maybe? (I read it's mostly used just to move the image to another drive, to then be more safe of recovering everything without the disk failing or simply just to have another copy, for like forensic work etc

...So now i have tried Analyse - Quick Search - right arrow selecting P on both the EFI (not sure what this is really) and the Mac HFS partition, to then get this when pressing P to show lists 'Support for this filesystem hasn't been implemented.'

So now i'm stuck, lol All other data recovery software i've researched for mac doesn't seem to bring back the file structure, and i have a lot of applications (i think) Movies, Films, Documentaries and Music (all of which were in Albums or they were bluray .m2ts files.. of which when using other software, it puts all the files in one single folder with 100s of files all with random names... so very hard to put back together :(

If anyone could shed some light on my situation.. it would be very much appreciated.. I feel like i'm close but maybe the software simply isn't able to read HFS+ volumes, and if so i will have to bite the bullet if no other software works.

many thanks to anyone that helps,
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Re: Accidentally erased HFS+ storage drive using Disk Utility having some issues using testdisk

#2 Post by cgrenier »

TestDisk should be able to recover your HFS+ but it can't list the files.
If it doesn't work, you can sort the files recovered by PhotoRec. There is a chapter about it in https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf

bloooor
Posts: 2
Joined: 16 Mar 2020, 21:51

Re: Accidentally erased HFS+ storage drive using Disk Utility having some issues using testdisk

#3 Post by bloooor »

HI thanks for the reply, currently i'm at the position where i click 'write' and Y to confirm but then prompted to "reboot for the changes to take effect" which i restart my mac, let it boot back up, open terminal, unmount the disk and try again and just get the same message.... do you know what i might be doing wrong? I've put all my screenshots of what i'm doing below if that helps

https://imgur.com/a/91tW3Bo

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