Issue recovering using PHOTOREC

[pyousif0]

Hello and thanks for any pieces of advice I appreciate it,

One day plugged my WD Elements 4 tb hard drive in and it didn't show up. Checked DU on my mac and it wouldn't let me mount so I started doing research about a month ago and have tried literally everything. I have almost 3 TB of info on there so each program takes DAYS to run and any piece of advice I am reading on the internet, the trial and error is a week long process even when one setting is asked to be tweaked. Data recovery places here in Phoenix are asking over $500 because of the size of the disk and I don't have that kind of money. Not to give you a sob story but just wanted to try this before asking for help and I have failed hard....

I am using a windows 10 computer to run photorec on my WD 4tb HD that was formatted in FAT and used completely on my Mac to edit movies and photos on Photoshop, Final Cut and Adobe products thats all thats on there. My windows is just faster thats why I am using it.

SO far I have tried to run Photorec multiple times and even changing the setting to 512 bit because I have heard that helps. First of all it gives me 1000000's of recup.dir full of .txt and .plist files and the occasional .mov. I am unsure how to get a stable recovery where at least if my folders are recovered which might be too much to ask at least the files are recovered properly.

I understand a lot is going on out there and people are busy in their own way, and would love to help any way I can maybe my issue might be another person's so please share if you've ran into this and how to achieve better results.

Thank you for reading at this point.

[cgrenier]

Disable txt and txt? in FIleOptions, does PhotoRec recover more video files ?
If your videos files were fragmented, it may explain why PhotoRec failed to recover them.

[pyousif0]

Disable txt and txt? in FIleOptions, does PhotoRec recover more video files ?
If your videos files were fragmented, it may explain why PhotoRec failed to recover them.

Thanks for the reply, so are you saying in theory if I do another recovery without the txt files it should recover more video files? It's just strange it recovers a tremendous amount of 3.2/4 tb I had used up on the drive but its a majority all in .txt and .plst so I was worried if I disable those then I barely will recover anything. I assumed the .txt .plist files were some sort of information that I could recover the videos from.

[BitterColdSoul]

I have no idea why, this reply I posted on 07 June was refused, which I noticed just now :

Post disapproved” – “The reported message is off topic. Your answer doesn't seem related to Photorec.

Well, sorry for trying to help someone in a situation where Photorec might not be the only or best possible tool / approach... So I'll try again, even if it's unlikely to be any useful months later, if it does get approved this time...

~~~~~~

The first thing you should do in a situation like this, if you definitely can't afford professional data recovery service, is to do a clone or image of the whole drive before attempting to run any kind of scan. Each time you scan with a data recovery software (except a few like Photorec which extract on-the-fly but without relying on the filesystem) you don't recover one bit of data and stress an already defective drive some more, it could fail for good at any time and you'd be left with nothing at all (except again with Photorec but it's a last resort method because you lose the original directory structure, timestamps and other attributes, and fragmented files won't be recovered correctly). The best free tools to clone or image a defective drive are ddrescue and HDDSuperClone, both running on Linux, and both readily available in this custom Lubuntu ISO provided by the author of HDDSuperClone. Obviously you need another drive of the same size to do the clone (or a bigger one to do a drive image but for a 4TB unit that would be unpractical, unless it had a lot of free space, in which case ddrescue with the -S switch can create a “sparse” image, which will occupy significantly less space -- I once made a “sparse” image of a 4TB HDD occupying only 502GB on the target drive).

Once you have a clone / image in a safe place, you can try different things to get something out of it, and it will be much faster to scan the same amount of data on a healthy drive.

Another thing to do (second in priority to cloning / imaging, but it's quick and doesn't stress the drive) : check the SMART status. Can be done in the same Lubuntu environment after installing GSMARTControl. (If I remember correctly it relies on a command line program which is natively installed, but a GUI is more convenient, as it will highlight the problematic values, like “reallocated sectors” and “pending sectors”.)

I've read on forum.hddguru.com that some Western Digital drives could suffer from a so-called “slow issue” once the amount of bad sectors reaches a certain level, there are ways to fix this so as to improve the speed of cloning / imaging.

[recuperation]

The best free tools to clone or image a defective drive are ddrescue and HDDSuperClone, both running on Linux, and both readily available in this custom Lubuntu ISO provided by the author of HDDSuperClone.

Is there any reason to use your promoted custom Lubuntu ISO instead of using a live Fedora CD as proposed in the manual or the small Gparted CD live iso?

[BitterColdSoul]

Is there any reason to use your promoted custom Lubuntu ISO instead of using a live Fedora CD as proposed in the manual or the small Gparted CD live iso?

Proposed in what manual ? A good enough reason is that it readily includes several tools dedicated to data recovery (it also has ddr_utility from the same author, a bunch of tools to enhance ddrescue's functionality), for a Linux newbie who wants to try them in a worrysome DR situation that's one less thing to worry about. Otherwise, ask the author, I don't know much about Linux's various “flavours”.

[recuperation]

https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf

Is there any reason to use your promoted custom Lubuntu ISO instead of using a live Fedora CD as proposed in the manual or the small Gparted CD live iso?

Proposed in what manual ?

The Testdisk and Photorec manual:
https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf

Reading is recommended.

A good enough reason is that it readily includes several tools dedicated to data recovery (it also has ddr_utility from the same author, a bunch of tools to enhance ddrescue's functionality), for a Linux newbie who wants to try them in a worrysome DR situation that's one less thing to worry about. Otherwise, ask the author, I don't know much about Linux's various “flavours”.

Based on the the questions I read in this forum using ddrescue is perfectly enough to generate a copy of their partially broken disc.
Explaining NTFS bitmaps and why ddru_ntfsfindbad went wrong is beyond the scope of this forum.

[BitterColdSoul]

Explaining NTFS bitmaps and why ddru_ntfsfindbad went wrong is beyond the scope of this forum.

Well, I didn't even talk about that, but, generally speaking, people come on this forum to request help and insight in an unpleasant situation where they have some failing storage device and want to recover their data from it, often with very limited prior knowledge about data recovery, they heard about Photorec which does very fine for its purpose, but it shouldn't prevent anyone among the rare halfway regular members from suggesting other approaches which may be beneficial in a particular situation... If it really is considered a problem I sure won't insist, but I would find it weird.

[recuperation]

I still miss the answer to my question.

You could as well recommend an Opensuse live DVD at 4187MB.

I selected the Gparted ISO for a reason. Even if it grows, at a size of currently 366 MB it will still fit onto a CD.
That will enable people to easily run it in their old laptop.

And if they only have a slow or expensive internet connection that size minimizes the download time and cost.

Concerning your reposted deleted posting, it did not contain specific information relating to the thread subject. Its whole pattern highly ressembles to spammer attacks on this forum. To prevent deletion simply respond specifically to the question asked.

[BitterColdSoul]

My whole pattern must highly resemble many bad things in this messed-up world, I'm afraid... é_è
Anyway, I won't stay long around here, the general mood is not exactly welcoming, I sure don't need that these days.