Cyrillic filenames displaying strangely after copying

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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picart
Posts: 2
Joined: 25 Nov 2015, 13:14

Cyrillic filenames displaying strangely after copying

#1 Post by picart »

Hello,

I'm helping a colleague who works in a Russian archive to recover files from a faulty external hard drive (a Freecom Toughdrive).

I've been able to use TestDisk to both view the disk and copy stored files from it (around 150GB in total). Many of the files being recovered have Cyrillic filenames. In the copying process, TestDisk seems to have changed these into 'weird' characters, e.g:

Копия Свадьба

becomes

Копия Свадьба

It's true across every instance of a Cyrillic filename. I've also had similar results with EaseUS, which displays filenames correctly in the Partition Recovery browser, but in the Data Recovery Wizard it shows them simply as strings of '___'.

I'm no expert at all but I believe this is something to do with the Cyrillic UTF-8 characters being displayed in Windows-1252 encoding. Feeding various altered filenames through an online converter to get the correct Cyrillic translation (using this: http://2cyr.com/decode/?lang=en) seems to establish that.

Is there a way to preserve the Cyrillic filenames when extracting them with TestDisk? Or is it that TestDisk can't translate them? If so, are there any other options? Might it be an issue with not having the correct Windows language pack on the PC I'm copying files to?

It's a problem because there are literally thousands of files dating back many years that have been affected, so manually going through and renaming them using the online converter will be a massive headache. Another colleague has offered to write a script that would batch convert them, but I'm hoping there's another potentially more straightforward solution.

Thanks in advance for any ideas/help you could give.

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cgrenier
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Re: Cyrillic filenames displaying strangely after copying

#2 Post by cgrenier »

Which version of TestDisk are you using ? ie. do you have the problem with both TestDisk 7.1-WIP for Windows 32 bits and TestDisk 7.1-WIP for Windows 64 bits.
What is the filesystem type of the source ? of the destination ?

picart
Posts: 2
Joined: 25 Nov 2015, 13:14

Re: Cyrillic filenames displaying strangely after copying

#3 Post by picart »

Hi,

I've tried both 64bit versions from the wiki download section (7.0 and 7.1-WIP). We are running a Win7 64bit image.

The filesystem of the drive is NTFS, same for the destination (a local disk on a PC).

Thanks

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Fiona
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Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 17:19
Location: Ludwigsburg/Stuttgart - Germany

Re: Cyrillic filenames displaying strangely after copying

#4 Post by Fiona »

TestDisk 64bit is only intended running on genuine 64bit machines like Itanium.
Also on the download page there is a description, should only be used on 64bit machines without WoW64 (windows 32bit emulator) as some features are missing.
On normal 64bit Windows, TestDisk 7.1WIP 32bit is recommended.
It might be possible that the 32bit version achieves better results.

Fiona

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