Created Unformatted Partition Over the Partition I want to recover

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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FuriousGeorge
Posts: 1
Joined: 28 Jul 2016, 03:38

Created Unformatted Partition Over the Partition I want to recover

#1 Post by FuriousGeorge »

I deleted a partition, then created a raw partition the same way (Win disk management) and same size, over it. I did that twice. The first was a regular MBR partitioned disk. The second was first converted to GPT due to it's size.

The disks contain(ed) proprietary format video files for a DVR, and were full.

On the first disk (1TB), I did a search and found a partition (I don't recall if it was one or two at this point), and wrote it to disk. It came up as a D: (RAW) in the OS upon reboot.

In testdisk, if I select the D: drive, and at the subsequent screen I leave the default value of [None] Non Partitioned Media), then under filesystem utils I see:

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TestDisk 7.0, Data Recovery Utility, April 2015
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org

>   P NTFS                     0   0  1 121600 253 63 1953520002
That looks good, but I can not list any files. It says "Filesystem may be damaged".

If I select [ Boot ], I see:

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Boot sector
Status: OK

Backup boot sector
Status: OK
Sectors are identical.
A valid NTFS Boot sector must be present in order to access any data; even if the partition is not bootable.
So I selected "Rebuild", and it looks like it's going to take another few hours. (Shouldn't that be the case if there are 'a lot' of files?) I'm worried that I may be doing the wrong thing or on the wrong track, however.



On the 4tb disk, before scanning, I see:

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Disk /dev/sdc - 4000 GB / 3726 GiB - CHS 486401 255 63
Current partition structure:
     Partition                  Start        End    Size in sectors

No FAT, NTFS, ext2, JFS, Reiser, cramfs or XFS marker
 1 P MS Reserved    34     262177     262144 [Microsoft reserved partition]
 1 P MS Reserved      34     262177     262144 [Microsoft reserved partition]
Based on the size, neither of those can be my data.

So, right now I'm scanning. It looks like it may take longer than 10 hours, even though it started at 54%.

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Disk /dev/sdc - 4000 GB / 3726 GiB - CHS 486401 255 63
Analyse cylinder 267360/486400: 54%
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  MS Data                     2048 4294045695 4294043648
MS Data               4293124097 4294045696     921600
MS Data               4294045696 4294967295     921600
That first partition, I believe, is one that existed before the one I'm am trying to recover. It was partitioned MBR, so the partition was half the size of the entire disk. Attempting to rebuild the BS on that partition goes quickly and fails, so I'm doing a "quick search" and just letting it go for now, and I'll update this thread accordingly. It looks like it will take longer than ten hours.

Any pointers would be appreciated.

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cgrenier
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Re: Created Unformatted Partition Over the Partition I want to recover

#2 Post by cgrenier »

As you have created another partition over the old one, you should try photorec instead.
In Options, enable the Expert mode. Start a recovery and use a blocksize of 512 bytes, use the default options otherwise.
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

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