Data recovery on external aha dad

Using PhotoRec to recover lost data
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Tony
Posts: 2
Joined: 06 Jun 2014, 22:54

Data recovery on external aha dad

#1 Post by Tony »

Hi,

I got an external hard drive from a girlfriend of mine who basically potentially lost ten years of personal data.
I tried already a couple of things, but don't want to screw it up any further so I'm seeking for advices.

So neither Windows nor Linux could find any folders on the disk. Properties say that there is 400GB of data on it, NFTS, but no folders can be found.

So I hooked it up in testdisk, which could immediately find a partition but only display one folder that was present on the root of the disk. I run Ubuntu 13.10.

I tried to switch the partition to logical, noting happened except that there is now two partitions. The new one is not of NFTS type, but I can' recall the type and cannot access the computer anymore. Was not FAT neither.

Then I decided to copy what could be copied. I could save all the data that was in the visible folder, approx 150 GB. After checking with my friend everything from the folder was backed up.

250 GB remains unseen. Should I give a try with PhotoRec? Did I make it worse with testdisk? Something more I can try before PhotoRec?

Thanks for your help. I can post screenshots of testdisk tomorrow if necessary.

AlainDelon
Posts: 8
Joined: 22 Jun 2014, 14:50

Re: Data recovery on external aha dad

#2 Post by AlainDelon »

Hi Tony,
Data recovery is a time consuming tasks and the easiest way is to read all the files if possible and copy the all files using a working computer to another HDD.The data is intact as long as the mechanical parts are working in your HDD.

'So neither Windows nor Linux could find any folders on the disk. Properties say that there is 400GB of data on it, NFTS, but no folders can be found.'

Can pls elaborate on this 'could find any folders on the disk'.It's not possible to not find any folders on the disc unless there are no directories or not readable. 400GB is huge and a gigantic task.

'cannot access the computer anymore. Was not FAT neither'
Do you mean the ext HDD or the computer? The data are stored in FAT32 HDD that was factory formatted and used directly by your gf without reformatting by her. There is no MBR sector in it since there was no OS installed. MBR sector empty.

Tony
Posts: 2
Joined: 06 Jun 2014, 22:54

Re: Data recovery on external aha dad

#3 Post by Tony »

Thanks for the reply,

I eventually managed to retrieve everything using PhotoRec. It took approx. 8 hours to retrieve the data.

The data was stored in NTFS.

I think the problem was that no system files could be found.

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