rehabbing a flash drive
Posted: 11 Sep 2013, 14:32
I smile as I find myself again using TestDisk/Photorec. A few months ago Photorec saved my bacon when I 'lost' some photos on a SD card.
The other day I was backing up an older 8 GB flash drive (FAT32?) on my OS X 10.5.x machine using Disk Utility by creating a disk image. This is something I had done previously on this flash drive (and many others) as a way to back up my data. I never expected running Disk Utility to creat a disk image could somehow crap out a drive! And my last backup of this flash drive was months ago so I would like to rehab it.
But the disk image creation did not finish successfully and now the flash drive won't mount. Disk Utility won't see it and Disk Warrior won't fix it.
I started data recovery yesterday using PhotoRec (on a different Mac, this one running something really old, 10.4.x!) and it was finding lots of files, but the time estimate for the I think what could be 7 GB of data was over 60 hours, so I abandoned that until later today when I can let it run over the weekend.
But I'm still hopeful to 'fix' whatever happened to it. I'll copy and paste most of what I've done so far using TestDisk.
Here is what shows initially:
Select a media (use Arrow keys, then press Enter):
Disk /dev/disk2 - 500 GB / 465 GiB (RO)
Disk /dev/disk3 - 500 GB / 465 GiB (RO)
Disk /dev/disk5 - 500 GB / 465 GiB (RO)
>Disk /dev/disk6 - 8086 MB / 7711 MiB
Disk /dev/rdisk2 - 500 GB / 465 GiB (RO)
Disk /dev/rdisk3 - 500 GB / 465 GiB (RO)
Disk /dev/rdisk4 - 499 GB / 465 GiB
Disk /dev/rdisk5 - 500 GB / 465 GiB (RO)
Disk /dev/rdisk6 - 8086 MB / 7711 MiB
Where disk6 seems to be showing with the correct size of the 8GB flash drive.
TestDisk seems to think this is a Humax, as shown below:
Please select the partition table type, press Enter when done.
[Intel ] Intel/PC partition
[EFI GPT] EFI GPT partition map (Mac i386, some x86_64...)
>[Humax ] Humax partition table
[Mac ] Apple partition map
[None ] Non partitioned media
[Sun ] Sun Solaris partition
[XBox ] XBox partition
[Return ] Return to disk selection
Hint: Humax partition table type has been detected.
I don't think that is correct, so I select Intel/PC partition and hit enter, and do an analyze, giving this:
Disk /dev/disk6 - 8086 MB / 7711 MiB
15794175 sectors - sector size=512
>[ Analyse ] Analyse current partition structure and search for lost partitions
[ Advanced ] Filesystem Utils
[ Geometry ] Change disk geometry
[ Options ] Modify options
[ MBR Code ] Write TestDisk MBR code to first sector
[ Delete ] Delete all data in the partition table
[ Quit ] Return to disk selection
Disk /dev/disk6 - 8086 MB / 7711 MiB - 15794175 sectors
Current partition structure:
Partition Start End Size in sectors
Warning: number of heads/cylinder mismatches 249 (FAT) != 1 (HD)
Warning: number of sectors per track mismatches 62 (FAT) != 1 (HD)
1 * FAT32 63 15794174 15794112 [JWB_THUMB]
Warning: Bad ending sector (CHS and LBA don't match)
It is here where I'm not quite sure how to proceed (assuming I've gotten to a good point on my own!).
Seeking guidance.
Joe
The other day I was backing up an older 8 GB flash drive (FAT32?) on my OS X 10.5.x machine using Disk Utility by creating a disk image. This is something I had done previously on this flash drive (and many others) as a way to back up my data. I never expected running Disk Utility to creat a disk image could somehow crap out a drive! And my last backup of this flash drive was months ago so I would like to rehab it.
But the disk image creation did not finish successfully and now the flash drive won't mount. Disk Utility won't see it and Disk Warrior won't fix it.
I started data recovery yesterday using PhotoRec (on a different Mac, this one running something really old, 10.4.x!) and it was finding lots of files, but the time estimate for the I think what could be 7 GB of data was over 60 hours, so I abandoned that until later today when I can let it run over the weekend.
But I'm still hopeful to 'fix' whatever happened to it. I'll copy and paste most of what I've done so far using TestDisk.
Here is what shows initially:
Select a media (use Arrow keys, then press Enter):
Disk /dev/disk2 - 500 GB / 465 GiB (RO)
Disk /dev/disk3 - 500 GB / 465 GiB (RO)
Disk /dev/disk5 - 500 GB / 465 GiB (RO)
>Disk /dev/disk6 - 8086 MB / 7711 MiB
Disk /dev/rdisk2 - 500 GB / 465 GiB (RO)
Disk /dev/rdisk3 - 500 GB / 465 GiB (RO)
Disk /dev/rdisk4 - 499 GB / 465 GiB
Disk /dev/rdisk5 - 500 GB / 465 GiB (RO)
Disk /dev/rdisk6 - 8086 MB / 7711 MiB
Where disk6 seems to be showing with the correct size of the 8GB flash drive.
TestDisk seems to think this is a Humax, as shown below:
Please select the partition table type, press Enter when done.
[Intel ] Intel/PC partition
[EFI GPT] EFI GPT partition map (Mac i386, some x86_64...)
>[Humax ] Humax partition table
[Mac ] Apple partition map
[None ] Non partitioned media
[Sun ] Sun Solaris partition
[XBox ] XBox partition
[Return ] Return to disk selection
Hint: Humax partition table type has been detected.
I don't think that is correct, so I select Intel/PC partition and hit enter, and do an analyze, giving this:
Disk /dev/disk6 - 8086 MB / 7711 MiB
15794175 sectors - sector size=512
>[ Analyse ] Analyse current partition structure and search for lost partitions
[ Advanced ] Filesystem Utils
[ Geometry ] Change disk geometry
[ Options ] Modify options
[ MBR Code ] Write TestDisk MBR code to first sector
[ Delete ] Delete all data in the partition table
[ Quit ] Return to disk selection
Disk /dev/disk6 - 8086 MB / 7711 MiB - 15794175 sectors
Current partition structure:
Partition Start End Size in sectors
Warning: number of heads/cylinder mismatches 249 (FAT) != 1 (HD)
Warning: number of sectors per track mismatches 62 (FAT) != 1 (HD)
1 * FAT32 63 15794174 15794112 [JWB_THUMB]
Warning: Bad ending sector (CHS and LBA don't match)
It is here where I'm not quite sure how to proceed (assuming I've gotten to a good point on my own!).
Seeking guidance.
Joe