Strategy to recover NTFS?
Posted: 12 Mar 2016, 03:35
Hi Folks -
I had two 5TB Samsung drives. I shut down my Windows 8 laptop and swapped the two drives so that my photo drive could use the USB3 connection. Once I turned the laptop back on, nothing worked. Each drive thought it was the other one briefly, but no files could be accessed, no writes could be performed. Eventually I lost all system knowledge that one drive was NTFS at all, looks RAW, no partition no data.
I used photo rec successfully in the past to recover files from an SD card, so I thought I'd give testdisk a try. I incorrectly identified my partitions as intel when I did my first "quick analyze"; I'm running again now as EFI GPT, but it takes at least overnight to run but I don't have any screenshots to show yet.
I'm posting this to ask though... what strategy should I use to recover my data? I thought NTFS kept multiple copies of its file indexes so if one got corrupted the other could be used or something, but I'm not seeing any evidence of that. I know my drives aren't bad, I know my files are there, it is just the directory structure/index that is fried. I have another good 5TB Samsung if it helps to give the partition information from it, to try and restore one of these, but of course it has a different set of files.
I have about 9 out of the 10tb I lost backed up, but the last TB would be nice to get back. Suggestions? Ideas?
Thanks.
I had two 5TB Samsung drives. I shut down my Windows 8 laptop and swapped the two drives so that my photo drive could use the USB3 connection. Once I turned the laptop back on, nothing worked. Each drive thought it was the other one briefly, but no files could be accessed, no writes could be performed. Eventually I lost all system knowledge that one drive was NTFS at all, looks RAW, no partition no data.
I used photo rec successfully in the past to recover files from an SD card, so I thought I'd give testdisk a try. I incorrectly identified my partitions as intel when I did my first "quick analyze"; I'm running again now as EFI GPT, but it takes at least overnight to run but I don't have any screenshots to show yet.
I'm posting this to ask though... what strategy should I use to recover my data? I thought NTFS kept multiple copies of its file indexes so if one got corrupted the other could be used or something, but I'm not seeing any evidence of that. I know my drives aren't bad, I know my files are there, it is just the directory structure/index that is fried. I have another good 5TB Samsung if it helps to give the partition information from it, to try and restore one of these, but of course it has a different set of files.
I have about 9 out of the 10tb I lost backed up, but the last TB would be nice to get back. Suggestions? Ideas?
Thanks.