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NTFS parititon accessible; structure appears to be OK; contents of files completely mixed up

Posted: 29 Aug 2018, 21:50
by choxnox
Hello,

I don't know if this is the correct subforum so please excuse the mistake, if any. To make the long story short:

I have 3 partition on 1 TB HDD:
1. Windows 10 (64-bit)
2. Windows 10 (32-bit)
3. Data (NTFS partition shared between these two Windows installations)

I've tried to resize Data partition with Acronis tool, it stopped in the process rendering Data partition inaccessible. I've used TestDisk to repair the partition and now I can browse the file/directory structure which appears to be intact - all files and directories are there with their original names. However, none of the file contents match. Basically it's all garbage. I went to recover files with different tools (PhotoRec, R-Studio etc.) and all of them detect file contents correctly but I lose file names and structure in that case.

Excuse me for my wording because I'm a software engineer by profession but my thinking is file pointers are out of place - file structure is accessible; file contents are recoverable but the only problem is files do not point to the correct location on the disk. I'd say all pointers are shifted for the unknown amount either back or forth (because of partition resize/move operation). For example I go to check the content of one file and I see it consist of more than of file - it starts with binary content then in the middle I see e.g. one of my source codes then again binary.

Is there any way to recover such damage to the partition?

Re: NTFS parititon accessible; structure appears to be OK; contents of files completely mixed up

Posted: 30 Aug 2018, 06:01
by cgrenier
Maybe another list of files exists with another offset. I don't know if it will works but run TestDisk, Advanced, select the DATA partition, Boot, RebuildBS, List. Copy a file, check its content. If it's ok, choose Write, confirm, Quit and restart your computer.
If it doesn't work, you will have to sort the files recovered by PhotoRec...