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A friend had a computer problem and the Gateway helpdesk told her to restore her computer to the factory image but did not tell her that all her files would be lost during the reformat. I am trying to help her recover 20+ years of photographs and other files. I have the disk drive (320-GB Seagate SATA) mounted in a USB disk caddy and connected to my computer.

I assumed that PhotoRec is the appropriate tool but should I use TestDisk instead?

Should I scan the whole partition or just the unallocated space?

I have not heard back from anyone so I decided to just try PhotoRec. It ran for 4 hours and did recover several thousand jpg files; however, over 99% of them are tiny thumbnail images.

I hope to receive replies with other suggestions.

Run TestDisk, Advanced, select the partition, List. If you can see your files, copy them and/or try "chkdsk /f d:"
If it doesn't work, run PhotoRec, be carefull to choose [Whole] instead of [Free]