Weird One...Files not showing

Using TestDisk to repair the filesystem
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JohnnyB1234
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Joined: 31 Mar 2019, 16:09

Weird One...Files not showing

#1 Post by JohnnyB1234 »

Hi,

I have an 1tb NTFS Hard drive, of which I was using around 155-160GB. It is the internal drive of a laptop. it stopped booting windows a few days ago, and would instead boot to the recovery options (i.e. troubleshoot, system repair etc.). When trying to backup using HP Recovery it would say destination drive not connected even when it was, and when using the notepad.exe through cmd it crashed mid transfer after saying that one of the files needed administrator privileges. Before that, I could see the file structure and was just trying to back it up. Foolishly, I did not take it out and just copy over the data. now it no longer shows the files. I've put it in an enclosure and windows is showing it as unallocated in diskmgmt.msc and not showing at all in windows explorer.

when I was using HP recovery, through it i ran a chkdsk (read-only) which crashed at around 53%. I've got it in the enclosure now hooked up to another PC running testdisk. it shows the partition, but when I hit p to view the files it only shows one folder which is called Intel. I've not seen this folder before, and nothing in it has any of my files. what can I do?
This was done on logical drive, but it also shows physical drive which I'm doing a deep search on now. both are showing same results so far from what i can tell.

Any and all help would be appreciated. I want to have more of a plan before i proceed and try other things and lose any chance of recovering that EXTREMELY important data.

Thanks, JB

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cgrenier
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Re: Weird One...Files not showing

#2 Post by cgrenier »

You should try to clone your disk using ddrescue to a new empty disk.
Read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf for more details.
Once the clone is done, remove the original disk and try to recover your data from the clone.

JohnnyB1234
Posts: 3
Joined: 31 Mar 2019, 16:09

Re: Weird One...Files not showing

#3 Post by JohnnyB1234 »

Thanks for your reply

There was 150-160gb of data on the 1tb hard drive. Do i need another 1tb drive (i have one) or can I just use one that is >160gb?
Will doing the ddrescue potentially harm the other drive in any way?
Will doing the ddrescue delete the data of the original drive?

here are screenshots of what I am seeing in testdisk
1.png
1.png (28.25 KiB) Viewed 2865 times
2.png
2.png (23 KiB) Viewed 2865 times
Again, just making sure I know what I'm doing before going forward.

Many Thanks, JB

recuperation
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Joined: 04 Jan 2019, 09:48
Location: Hannover, Deutschland (Germany, Allemagne)

Re: Weird One...Files not showing

#4 Post by recuperation »

Hello JohnnyB1234,
JohnnyB1234 wrote: 02 Apr 2019, 21:48 Thanks for your reply

There was 150-160gb of data on the 1tb hard drive. Do i need another 1tb drive (i have one) or can I just use one that is >160gb?
If you have ddrescue work on partition level you need as much space as the source partition requires.
If you have ddrescue work on drive level you need as much space as the drive requires.

If you have ddrescue copy the source into a file you need a little bit of overhead space.

Say your hard drive has a size of 1TB.
You can copy that physically to another raw unpartitioned unformatted harddrive which has the at least the same size. Additional space does not do dammage but remains unused.
If you want to copy that same source as a file to a target drive, 1TB is not sufficient anymore, because partitioning and formatting a partition reduces the available free space which will be a little bit less than 1TB.

I suggest you copy the whole drive.
Will doing the ddrescue potentially harm the other drive in any way?
Depending on the mode you use it will just overwrite the sectors of the target drive or write a file into the file system on the target drive.
Harm will arise if you confuse source and target.
This is the biggest risk.
Will doing the ddrescue delete the data of the original drive?
No, it only reads from the source drive. If your source drive is physically dammaged, reading may continue to dammage the source drive.
This happens to me with a drived named "Samsung S1 Mini".

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cgrenier
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Re: Weird One...Files not showing

#5 Post by cgrenier »

When using ddrescue and a disk as destination, the destination disk will be erased.
If using ddrescue and a file as destination, the very large file is created.
In both cases, the destination must be at least as large as the source disk even if there was few data on the source disk.

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