cgsecurity.org

Hey there.

In CMD, I accidentally ran...
...on my 2TB external hard-drive. The format only lasted for a few seconds before I stopped it with Ctrl+C, but was enough to make the drive unavailable to Explorer and lose the data. So far I'm finding testdisk's interface really confusing to use, but from what I can tell it seems to be reporting that the drive's file system is FAT16.

The drive is a 2TB external drive that I'm pretty sure was NTFS before the damage, so is there a known, particular reason that the drive would appear to the above programs as FAT16? How likely is it to be FAT16 vs NTFS? Should I continue treating it as a FAT16 drive in testdisk or should I attempt to restore it back to an NTFS file system and then work with it?

Thanks in advance, I'd really appreciate the help with getting my data back.

Does TestDisk find your partition after Quick Search and Deeper Search ?

Yes, that's where it lists as being a FAT16 partition. I'm currently trying to change it by setting the partition type. I've since been told that it's more likely to be exFAT as most external drives use exFAT, but I can't find an option for exFAT in the list of partition types? Should I just try FAT32?

cgrenier wrote: ↑12 Aug 2017, 19:15 Does TestDisk find your partition after Quick Search and Deeper Search ?

I just ran another Quick Search, and here are the results I got:



I'll wait on your recommendation on where to go from here. I've been attempting to recover this drive for a few weeks now, using TestDisk and other read-only utilities, and I really would like to get the data off with the original folder structure. GetDatBack Simple came back with over 200 filesystems and Recuva couldn't identify it as one at all. Thanks in advance.

Please post the next screen or better the testdisk.log file content.

cgrenier wrote:Please post the next screen or better the testdisk.log file content.

Here are the results of the Deep Search:



Attaching the log file as an attachment gives me an "invalid file extension" error, so I've pasted it here:

https://pastebin.com/vP8sQ0zb

Btw can you see that image? All I'm seeing is text that says Image, does this forum block images or something?